The Phaff Yeast Culture Collection, as it's known, consists of more than 7,000 strains of 750 different species of the single-celled fungi, mixed with glycerine in cryogenically stored vials or freeze-dried into pellets. Roughly 80 percent of them are not held by any other yeast library in the world.

Kyria Boundy-Mills, the Phaff Collection curator, knows this because last year she surveyed her global yeast-collecting colleagues, then published her findings in the Journal of Industrial Microbiology and Biotechnology. Her own yeast empire is one of several such microbial archives around the world, ranging from broad national "type" libraries to niche collections specializing in microbes from reefs, breweries, and even Antarctic explorers' huts.

As Boundy-Mills showed Venue around her office and lab, she explained that the Phaff Collection's main focus is yeasts isolated from environmental habitats: gathered from sewage sludge, vanished cacti forests, cockroaches, hot springs, glaciers, human cerebrospinal fluid, and a mare's uterus.

The oldest yeast in the collection was isolated by the UC Berkeley cellarmaster in 1893. When Venue visited, Boundy-Mills was still busy processing the 150 new species of yeast she brought back from a 2011 National Institutes of Health-funded biodiversity survey expedition in Indonesia.

"Nearly half of them are new to science," she told us, which makes them a lot of work. "That’s lifetime’s worth of work there, just to describe 60 new species."

The expedition, which included entomologists, botanists, and ichythologists, cataloged such an immense richness of biodiversity that, Mills told Venue, their research site has now been proposed as a national park. "If it's passed," she said, "it will be the first national park in Indonesia to be declared based on biodiversity data—and one of the first in the world based specifically on biodiversity."

The unspoken implication here—that there could even someday be a yeast-based national park—raises the fascinating subject of scale when discussing the types of landscapes or habitats we consider worthy of preservation. Could a single, microbiologically rich room or building be biologically important enough to be declared a national park?

In any case, while other colleagues focused on collecting and identifying microbes and plants with therapeutic potential, Boundy-Mills' focus was on possible bioenergy applications. Specifically, this meant looking for new enzymes that can break down plant materials to simpler sugars, as well as new yeast varieties that can eat sugar and turn it into oil. As Boundy-Mills explained:

Most yeasts will stop eating when they’re no longer hungry. But there are a few yeast species that keep eating the sugar—and eating it and eating it—and they convert it to oil and store it. Under the microscope, you see these big, huge oil droplets inside the cells. They can be up to 60 percent oil—they’re like these obese, couch-potato yeasts.

To find enzymes that can break down plant material, Boundy-Mills and her team sampled the gut microbes of wood-feeding beetle larvae, as well as the decaying wood around them. Meanwhile, a lot of the high-oil yeasts that Boundy-Mills brought back were isolated from the surface of leaves, with some coming from the soil.

Yeast cells, at only a couple of microns in length, are frequently more of a challenge to isolate for collection than plants or fish. In some cases, Boundy-Mills would just take a sterile bag, put it around a leaf, pluck it off, and pour in some sterile saline solution. After it had swished around for a while, she would put that liquid on an agar plate to culture any microbes that had been on the leaf's surface. Meanwhile, she told us with evident glee, a lot of the high-oil yeasts form ballistospores, meaning that they shoot out their spores, firing them several millimeters into the air:

This is kind of cool. For them, we smeared some Vaseline inside the lid of the Petri plate, and we stuck some pieces of leaf in the lid. If the yeast can make these ballistospores, they will shoot those down onto the agar surface and grow there. It’s called the ballistospore capture method.

Now that she has these Indonesian couch-potato yeasts back in the lab (after mountains of import and and export paperwork, and a lengthy process of purification and DNA analysis), Boundy-Mills is not only observing their oil production performance, but also studying the other by-products that could possibly come out of the yeast cell, in order to make it an economically viable biofuel production process.

As well as oils, some of her yeasts produce protein, anti-oxidants, and even flavoring ingredients. Elsewhere in the collection are yeasts that show promise in agricultural pest control or are used in food processing.

One strain, Phaffia rhodozyma, was originally isolated on a tree stump in Japan, and is now used industrially to produce a dietary supplement for farmed salmon and shrimp, to make them pinker.

In addition to her own research and the occasional yeast-hunting expedition, Boundy-Mills spends her time preparing and sending out strains to researchers who request them, and maintaining the collection—no small task, as the yeasts are far from immortal, even in the extreme cold, so each strain has to be re-cultured on agar in Petri dishes every five years.

Kyria Boundy-Mills with Herman Phaff's notebooks. Phaff, who founded the collection, focused on the ecology of yeast, recording copious contextual notes on their functionality in nature, their interaction with decaying plant material, and the insects that live alongside them.

The Yeasts: A Taxonomic Study has expanded from one volume (center) to three (left) over the past decade.

Boundy-Mills also acts as a kind of yeast consultant, screening and identifying yeasts for biotech companies. As we prepared to leave, she showed us her yeast bible: a taxonomic catalog of all known yeasts. To help us understand why she finds the field so exciting, she explained:

In 2001, when Hermann Phaff, who founded this collection, died, the Taxonomic Study was just one volume, with about six or seven hundred species. In 2011, they had to split it into three volumes, to accommodate more than 1,400 species. And there’s another couple of hundred yeast species that have come out since that was published.

Incredibly, while the known universe of yeasts is increasing exponentially, thanks primarily to DNA sequencing technology, it's estimated that less than one percent of the world's yeast species have been discovered.

"It's one of the most under-surveyed fields—microbes in general," Boundy-Mills sighed. "There are no yeasts that are on the endangered species list because we wouldn't even know if they were at risk. We’re spending all this time and effort exploring the extraterrestrial world, which is great. But we need to spend more time and effort exploring the terrestrial world, too. There’s so much on this planet that we just have not discovered yet!"

On what was to be, sadly, Venue's only stop in Oregon, we went off-road to visit the world's largest organism, a colossal fungus in the remote eastern mountains of the state, about an hour west of the arid border with Idaho.

For most of the year, including the day we visited, the organism is only visible through its neighbors' distress. Armillaria ostoyae is a kind of honey fungus that parasitizes, colonizes, kills, and then decays the root systems of its conifer hosts; this leaves behind a tell-tale ring-shaped gradient of long-dead, dying, and recently infected trees.

The super-sized organism consists, for the most part, of underground rhizomorphs: long, shoestring-like threads that branch outward to find and infest new conifer roots.

(Top) Healthy trees, elsewhere in the Malheur National Forest. (Bottom) Trees felled by the world's largest organism, Malheur National Forest.

Much of the northeastern section of Oregon's Malheur National Forest is covered in discontinuous patches of fungus-killed trees. Until recently, however, they were thought to be the work of lots of separate mushrooms.

Then, in 2000, USDA researchers collected samples of fungus from a roughly four-mile square section of the forest, and cultured them together in a Petri dish; it was an experiment designed to map the boundary edges of different fungal individuals. To their surprise, the samples from different patches of forest refused to react with each other as an alien other, and subsequent tests confirmed that they were, in fact, genetically identical—all the samples came from the same individual fungus.

This single organism, which began life as a microscopic spore, had spread into a 2,385-acre web of thin, black filaments—roughly the same footprint as a second-tier American airport, such as Philadelphia International.

Further, based on estimates made for smaller individuals, Genet D, as it was fondly christened, weighs between 7,567 and 35,000 tons (an elephant, for reference, clocks in at a maximum of only 8 tons). The humongous fungus is even up there in terms of its age, which is estimated at anything from 1,900 to 8,650 years (although that is dwarfed in comparison to a 200,000-year-old patch of seagrass in the Mediterranean).

Map from the USDA guide to the Humongous Fungus, which includes GPS coordinates (PDF).

The USDA guide to the fungus (PDF) helpfully notes that the best viewpoint on the destruction wreaked by the world's largest organism is from the other side of the valley, just east of a gravel pit and next to its smaller, 482-acre cousin.

We stopped there and surveyed the devastated forest, briefly mulling the difficulties giant clones such as the humongous fungus pose to the very idea of the individual, while keeping our fingers crossed that the standing-dead trees around us wouldn't choose this moment to fall.

The Humongous Fungus in fruit. Photograph courtesy of the USDA.

In a great essay by the late Stephen Jay Gould—called, of course, "A Humongous Fungus Among Us"—Gould describes "the striking way that this underground fungal mat," in his case, a 30-acre Armillaria fungal clone in Michigan, "forces us to wrestle with the vital biological (and philosophical) question of proper definitions for individuality." He suggests, for example, that entirely new conceptualizations of parent-offspring relationships, let alone wholly new understandings of individuals and super-individuals, might be possible.

For the sake of offering an alternative, Gould asks, "Why not propose that such gigantic mats of rhizomorphs form as congeries, or aggregations made of products grown from several founding spores (representing many different parents), all twisted and matted together—in other words, a heap rather than a person?" To qualify biologically as a single individual, Gould later adds, a creature "must have a clear beginning (or birth) point, a clear ending (or death) point, and sufficient stability between to be recognized as an entity."

The "entity" all around us, then, curled up and knotted through the roots of the forest—"all twisted and matted together" both through itself and through the landscape it thrived within—was equal parts biological mystery only recently solved by genetic testing and a kind of invisible spectacle detectable only in its side-effects, a living and strangely sinister force acting on the hills from below.

Meanwhile, if you go into the Oregon woods on the hunt for the world's largest organism in the autumn, after the first rains, the fruiting honey mushrooms are supposed to be quite tasty.

This is a surprisingly generous statement, considering that Mooallem has spent the last few years researching a harrowing litany of accidental extinctions and unintended consequences—including a surreal day spent chasing ex-convictMartha Stewart as she and her film crew pursued polar bears across the Arctic tundra—in order to untangle the complicated legal and emotional forces that shape America's relationship with wildlife.

Despite the humor, the stakes are high: half the world's nine million species are expected to be extinct by the end of this century, and, as Mooallem explains, many of those that do survive will only hang on as a result of humans' own increasingly bizarre interventions, blurring the line between conservation and domestication to the point of meaninglessness.

On a foggy morning in San Francisco, Venue met Mooallem for coffee and a conversation that ranged from tortoise kidnappings to polar bear politics. An edited transcript of our conversation follows.

• • •

The polar bear tourism industry in Churchill, Manitoba, relies on a dozen specially built vehicles called Tundra Buggies that take tourists and their cameras out to see the world's southernmost bear population. Photo: Polar Bears International.

Manaugh: Exactly. But there’s a third example, in the middle section of the book, which is a butterfly. It’s not only a very obscure species in its own right, but it’s also found only in a very obscure Bay Area preserve that most people, even in Northern California, have never heard of. What was it about the story of that butterfly, in particular, that made you want to tell it?

Mooallem: I thought it would be really interesting to go from the polar bear, which is the mega-celebrity of the animal kingdom, to its complete opposite—to something no one really cared about—and to see what was at stake in a story where the general public doesn’t really care about the animal in question at all. It turned out that there was a hell of a lot at stake for the people working on that butterfly.

It’s called the Lange’s Metalmark butterfly, and it’s about the size of a quarter. As you said, it only lives in this one place called Antioch Dunes, which is about sixty-seven acres in total. It is surrounded by a waste-transfer station, a sewage treatment plant, and a biker bar, and there’s a gypsum factory right in the middle that makes wallboard. You can’t even walk across the preserve, actually, because of this giant industrial facility in the middle of it.

In fact, the outbuilding where Jaycee Dugard, the kidnapping victim, was held is just round the corner.

It’s a forgotten place. It’s not the sort of place you’d expect to spend a lot of time in if you’re writing a book about wildlife in America.

On top of all that, not only is the butterfly the animal in the book that people won’t have heard of, or that they won’t know much about, but it’s also the one that I didn’t know very much about, going in. Looking back on it, it was somewhat audacious to say in my book proposal that a third of the book was going to be the story of this butterfly, because I really knew almost nothing about it! But it ended up being by far the most fascinating story, for me. That’s at least partly because I had the sense that I was looking at things that no one had ever looked at and talking to people who no one had ever talked to before.

It also seemed as though, when you’re working in an environment like that on a species that doesn’t get a lot of support or interest, you’re confronting a lot of the fundamental questions of environmentalism in a much more dramatic way. You have to work harder to sort through them, because it’s difficult to make simple assumptions about what you’re doing—that what you’re doing is worthwhile and good—when you don’t have anyone telling you that, and when it looks as hopeless as it looks with the Lange’s Metalmark.

Maybe hopeless is too strong a word—but you can’t transpose romantic ideas about wilderness and animals onto the situation, because it’s just so glaringly unromantic. You can’t stand in Antioch Dunes and take a deep breath of fresh air and feel like you’re in some primordial wilderness. You don’t have that luxury.

The other thing that was interesting about the butterfly story was the fact that it was happening on such a small scale. The butterfly’s always just lived in this one spot—it’s the only place it lives on earth—so you could look at what happened to this small patch of land over a hundred years and meet all the people who came in & out of the butterfly’s story. It was quite self-contained. It was almost like a stage for a play to happen on.

Manaugh: Harry Lange, for whom the butterfly is named, has a great line that seems to sum up so much of the sadness and stupidity in the human relationship with wild animals. He said, after exterminating the very last of the Xerces Blue butterfly: “I always thought there would be more…”

Mooallem: Right—and that was the other extraordinary thing about the butterfly story.

When I started working on the book, I had no idea about the history of butterfly collectors in the Bay Area. Apparently, the Bay Area was a big hotspot for butterflies, because of the microclimates here. It can be ten or fifteen degrees hotter in the Mission District than it is at the beach; there can be fog in some places and not others; and all of this creates a sort of Galapagos Island effect. The whole peninsula is peppered with these different micro-populations of butterflies because of the different microclimates.

Meanwhile, in the early twentieth century, at a time when the Audubon Society and other groups were being founded and there was a turn against the overhunting of species, it still seemed OK and sort of benign to collect butterflies. It wasn’t considered “hunting.” You could transfer all of that ambition to conquer nature and discover new things to collecting butterflies. You’re here at the very end of North America, where the country finally runs out of room, and now you’re starting to run out of animals too, but there were still enough butterflies to collect and name after yourself.

The Xerces Blue is the first butterfly in America known to have gone extinct due to human disturbance. Photo: Andrew Warren/butterfliesofamerica.com

The story of Xerces Blue, which is the butterfly that Lange thought there would always be more of, is just incredible. Back then, past 19th Avenue, it was all sand dunes. I actually met a friend of Lange’s, named Ed Ross, who was a curator at the California Academy of Sciences; he had to be in his late eighties or early nineties.

He told me about growing up as a kid here and taking the streetcar out to 19th Avenue and just getting out with his butterfly net and walking to Ocean Beach over the dunes. Occasionally you’d see a hermit, he said.

That generation of butterfly nuts who were living in San Francisco in the early twentieth century saw that habitat being erased in front of their eyes.

That backstory really helped to shape my perception of a lot of things in the book by elongating the timescale. It brought up the whole idea of shifting baselines—this gradual, generational change in our accepted norm for the environment—and all these other, deeper questions that wouldn’t have come up if I’d just followed Martha Stewart around filming polar bears, as I do in the first section of the book. It’s a very different experience to zoom out and take in the entirety of a story as I did with the Lange’s Metalmark, which is why I think I enjoyed it so much.

Nicola Twilley: It’s interesting to note that Ed Ross doesn’t actually figure in the book, and that, elsewhere, you allude to several intriguing stories in just a sentence or two—to things like the volunteers who count fish at the Bonneville Dam. Instead, you deliberately keep the focus on the bear, the butterfly, and the bird. But what about all the animals or all the stories that didn’t make it into the book? Were there any particular gems that you had to leave out or that you wish you had kept?

Mooallem: There were tons! The fish counting thing is a perfect example.

I spent a day at the Bonneville Dam, and it was completely surreal. I barely touch on it in the book, but the question of how to get fish around the dam is a really interesting design problem. There have been different structures that were built and then shown not to work, and so they’ve had to adapt them or retrofit them, and that’s ended up creating all new problems that need to have something built to solve them, and so on.

The government has actually moved an entire colony of seabirds that were eating the fish at the mouth of the river. The fish that got through the dam would get to the mouth of the Columbia River, but then the double-crested cormorants would eat them all. So the government picked up the birds and moved them to another island in the river.

I felt as though, normally, when you hear about these kinds of stories, you just scratch the surface. We’re so used to hearing endangered species stories in very two-dimensional, heroic ways, where so-and-so is saving the frog or whatever, and I just knew that it couldn’t be that easy. If it was that straightforward—if you could just go out and pull up some weeds and the butterfly would survive—it wouldn’t be very meaningful work. That was the space I really wanted to get into—the muddiness where things don’t work out the way we draw them on paper.

At the same time, I was able to mention a lot of these bizarre stories—but, as you say, almost as an aside. Each one of those things could have been a much longer, deeper story. Take, for example, the “otter-free zone,” which was this incredible saga: the government was reintroducing otters in Southern California and, because of complaints from fishermen and the oil industry, they needed to control where the otters would swim. A biologist would have to go out in a boat with binoculars to look for otters that were inside the otter-free zone and, if he saw them, he’d have to try to capture them when they were sleeping and move them. It was just a hilarious, miserable failure. I spent a lot of time reporting on that—talking to the biologist and hearing what that work was actually like to have to do—yet, in the end, I only mention it. But I know there’s a deeper story there.

Sea-otter in Morro Bay, California, just north of the former otter-free zone. Photo: Mike Baird.

In fact, there’s a section of the book where I rattle off a bunch of these examples—there’s the project to keep right whales from swimming into the path of natural gas tankers, and there’s the North Carolina wolves and their kill-switch collars, and so on. Each one of those is its own Bonneville Dam story—its own complicated saga of solutions and newer solutions to problems that the original solutions caused. You could really get lost in that stuff. I did get lost in all that stuff for a long time.

This is my first book, of course, and I feel as though that’s the joy and the luxury of a book—that you do have the time and space to get lost in those things for a little while.

Manaugh: It’s funny how many of those kinds of stories there are. I remember an example that Liam Young, an architect based in London, told me. He spent some time studying the Galapagos Islands, and he told me this incredible anecdote about hunters shooting wild goats, Sarah Palin-style, from helicopters, because the goats had been eating the same plants that the tortoises depended on.

But, at one point, some local fishermen were protesting that the islands’ incredibly strict eco-regulations were destroying their livelihood, so they took a bunch of tortoises hostage. What was funny, though, is that all the headlines about this mention the tortoises—but, when you read down to paragraph five or six, it also mentions that something like nineteen scientists were also being held hostage. [laughter] It was as if the human hostages weren’t even worth mentioning.

Mooallem: [laughs] Wow. That reminds me of one story I saw but never followed up on, about some fishermen in the Solomon Islands who had slaughtered several hundred dolphins because some environmental group had promised them money not to fish, but then didn’t deliver the money.

Twilley: When you invest an animal with that much symbolic power, the stakes get absurdly high.

Mooallem: Exactly—look at the polar bear. Of course, the polar bear has lost a lot of its cachet. I don’t know whether you saw the YouTube video that Obama put out to accompany his big climate speech in June, but I was surprised: there wasn’t a single polar bear image in it. It was all floods and storms and dried-up corn. Four years ago, there would have definitely been polar bears in that video.

Today, though, the polar bear is just not as potent a symbol. It’s become too political. It doesn’t really resonate with environmentalists anymore and it ticks off everyone else. What’s amazing is that it’s just a freaking bear, yet it’s become as divisive a figure as Rush Limbaugh.

Manaugh: Speaking of politics, it feels at times as if the Endangered Species Act—that specific piece of legislation—serves as the plot generator for much of your book. Its effects, both intended and surreally unanticipated, make it a central part of Wild Ones.

Mooallem: It really does generate all the action, because it institutionalizes these well-meaning sentiments, and it makes money and federal employees available to act on them. It amps up the scale of everything.

The first thing that I found really interesting is the way in which the law was passed. It was pretty poorly understood by everyone who voted on it. The Nixon administration saw it as a feel-good thing. It was signed in the doldrums between Christmas and New Year’s, almost as a gift to the nation and a kind of national New Year’s resolution rolled into one. And it was passed in 1973, as well, during both Vietnam and Watergate, so the timing was perfect for something warm and fuzzy as a distraction.

But most people never read the law and they didn’t realize that some of the more hardcore environmentalist staff-members of certain congressmen had put in provisions that were a lot more far-reaching than any of the lawmakers imagined. Nixon didn’t understand that it would protect insects, for example. It was really just seen as protecting charismatic national symbols, in completely unspecified, abstract ways.

In the preamble to the law itself—I don’t remember the exact quote—it says something like: “We’re going to protect species and their ecosystems from extinction as a consequence of the economic development of the nation.” Passing a law that is supposed to put a check on the development and growth of the nation—all the things government is supposed to promote—is pretty astounding.

Obviously, the law’s done a tremendous amount of good, but I also think that, because of its almost back-room origins, there is a kind of sheepishness and reluctance among a lot of conservationists to draw on it to its full extent. I don’t spend a lot of time in the book on government policy, but, to get a little wonky for a second, I do find it interesting that there’s this hesitancy to really use the Endangered Species Act as a cudgel.

Groups like Center for Biological Diversity that basically spend their time suing the government to hold it to the letter of the Endangered Species Act, are quite controversial among other environmentalists for that very reason. There’s a feeling that it is too dangerous to really unleash the full power of the law. In some ways, I completely understand that, because there is no way to work these questions out. It’s not a zero sum game.

But the Endangered Species Act is always under attack. It’s always a political talking point to be able to say: we’re spending hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to study slugs or whatever.

Twilley: Then there’s the fact that it’s written so as to protect entire ecosystems, rather than just the animals themselves.

Mooallem: Exactly. To me, that’s actually the even more interesting part of this. Rudi Mattoni, the lepidopterist, pointed this out to me, and it’s why he became so disillusioned with the butterfly preservation work he was doing. The law says that it is supposed to protect endangered species and the ecosystems that they depend on. He and a lot of other people feel that the approach has been completely centered on species themselves at the expense of the larger ecosystem.

Even before the Lange’s Metalmark was listed as endangered, the Antioch Dunes ecosystem had been unraveling for decades. It was already pretty much destroyed. But, using the power of the Endangered Species Act, using the power of the federal government, and using a Fish & Wildlife Service employee whose job is just pulling weeds and keeping the plants that the butterfly needs in place, we’ve been able to maintain the butterfly there, in a place where it doesn’t really belong anymore because the landscape has changed so much.

I guess you could say that one of the weaknesses of the law—or you could say that’s actually the strength of the law, because it has protected a species from extinction even long after it should have been extinct, at least in an ecological sense. But it does bring up questions about what we are actually trying to accomplish.

Churchill's "polar bear jail," where bears that come into town are kept in one of twenty-eight cells, and held without food for up to a month so that they don't associate human settlements with a food reward. Photo: Bob and Carol Pinjarra.

At the end of its "sentence," if the Hudson Bay still hasn't frozen over, the bear is drugged and airlifted by helicopter to be released north of town, closer to where the ice first forms. Photo: Nick Miroff, via Jon Mooallem.

Manaugh: Preservation of an entire ecosystem, if you were to follow the letter of the law, would require an absolutely astonishing level of commitment. Saving the polar bear, in that sense, means that we’d have to restore the atmosphere to a certain level of carbon dioxide, and reverse Arctic melting, which might mean reforesting the Amazon or cutting our greenhouse gas emissions to virtually nothing, overnight. It’s inspiringly ambitious.

Mooallem: As I try to explain in the book, that’s basically why the polar bear became so famous, for lack of a better word. It became an icon of climate change, because in a shrewd, “gotcha” kind of way, the Center for Biological Diversity and other environmentalists chose the polar bear as their tool to try to use the Endangered Species Act to put pressure on the Bush administration to deal with climate change as a much larger problem.

Even though the environmental groups themselves admitted it was very unlikely that this would work, they were trying to make the case that the polar bear is endangered, that the thing that is endangering it is climate change, and that the government is legally compelled by the Endangered Species Act to deal with this threat to an Endangered Species. So, if you accept that the polar bear is endangered, then you have to accept the larger responsibility of dealing with climate change.

It’s a completely back-door way to try to force the government to act on climate change, but the result was that the polar bear ended up with this superstar status and popular recognition among the general public, which I found amazing.

What’s also interesting is that the Center for Biological Diversity had actually tried this tactic once before, using a bird called the Kittlitz’s Murrelet, and it completely failed. There’s this thing called the “warranted but precluded” category of the Endangered Species Act, which is basically a loophole.

If a species is endangered but the Fish & Wildlife Service or another agency feels that they can’t deal with it right now, they can just say, “Yes, we agree that this species is endangered, so we’re going to put it in a waiting room called ‘warranted but precluded,’ and we’ll get to it as soon as we’re done cleaning up this other mess.” Because there are so many species that are endangered and the threats keep escalating, the government has been able to shunt species after species onto that “warranted but precluded” list.

When the Center for Biological Diversity and a few other groups tried to pressure the administration to do something about climate change by getting the Kittlitz’s Murrelet listed as an Endangered Species, the government just used the “warranted but precluded” loophole, which also meant they didn’t have to rule on climate science or make any really difficult decisions.

But the Kittlitz’s Murrelet failed to inspire any kind of public support, so there was no pressure on the administration to do anything. The environmentalists who were petitioning to get the polar bear listed as part of their strategy to deal with climate change knew that the government could very easily apply the same loophole to the bear and duck the whole issue of climate science, again.

During the public comment period preceding the polar bear's accession to Endangered Species status, Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne received half a million letters and postcards, many of which were from children. Via Jon Mooallem.

The Center for Biological Diversity realized that they needed a public relations strategy as well as a legal strategy, and, by picking the polar bear, they knew that they could put the Bush administration on the spot. The Bush administration couldn’t just put the polar bear in this infinite waiting room, because people would be upset.

Kids started writing letters to the Secretary of the Interior begging him to save the polar bear. They were sending in their own hand-drawn pictures of bears, drowning.

A 2007 letter from a child to Dirk Kempthorne included this drawing of a drowning polar bear being eaten simultaneously by a shark and a lobster. Via Jon Mooallem.

In some ways, the premise of the book is that our emotions and imaginations about these animals dictates their ability to survive in the real world, and this story was a particularly fascinating—not to mention peculiar—example in which all this sentimental gushing over polar bears, which, on the face of it, seems mawkish and kind of silly, was the lynchpin in a legal proceeding. In that case, our emotions about this animal really did matter.

Of course, there’s a whole other part of the story where the administration got around it anyway. But, for a while, it mattered.

Twilley: In the book, you encounter a whole range of attitudes that people hold toward wild animals and conservation, and the journeys that they take from idealism to pragmatism to cynicism and despair. There’s William Temple Hornaday, for example, who gets ever more ambitious and optimistic, and who goes from being a taxidermist who hunted buffalo to founding the National Zoo, and then on to a project to restock the Great Plains.

Manikin for Male American Bison, Hornaday (1891), via Hanna Rose Schell; Hornaday's innovative taxidermy "Buffalo Group," originally displayed at the U.S. National Museum (now the Smithsonian), and since relocated to Fort Benton, Montana (photo: Pete and the Wonder Egg).

Then there’s Rudi Mattoni, the lepidopterist you were talking about, who starts out as a pioneer of captive breeding and reintroduction, and then gives up and moves to Buenos Aires to catalog plants and animals so that at least we will have a record of what we’ve destroyed. Through the process of visiting all these places and spending time talking with all these people, did your own attitude toward wild animals and conservation evolve or shift at all?

Mooallem: What was great about writing the book was being able to absorb all these different perspectives. I met all these different people, some of whom are incredibly jaded and some of whom are incredibly idealistic, but, when you step back, you see that, as a species, we’re all in this struggle together, and this incredibly diverse group of people are all doing their best to grab hold of some piece of it and try to solve it.

That was where the “weirdly reassuring” part of my book title came from—from looking at conservationists as a breed, rather than just an individual person. If I had just written a book about the many, many old, battle-scarred conservationists who are extremely bitter and who claim to have given up, I think I would have ended up being really depressed. I think that it’s important to remember that there are people at all different points on that spectrum of idealism and disillusionment and they all serve a purpose. I identified with all of them, and that kept me from identifying too strongly with any one of them.

I wasn’t trying to advocate any particular position or solve any problems with this book. I actually didn’t realize this till the end, but what I was really doing was just trying to figure out how you’re supposed to feel about all this. How should you feel and respond when you look at everything that’s going on with the environment? What I tried to do is collect the attitudes and emotions of the people that I met and than to take what was useful.

I would get off the phone, for instance, with someone like Mattoni and he would be so horribly pessimistic about everything, yet somehow I would feel slightly exhilarated by it. Here’s someone who is so close to these questions—really big questions about what the place of humans on earth should be—and he’s just totally beaten down by them. But he’s in contact with them. He’s living in engagement with those kinds of questions, and there was something beautiful about that. It doesn’t necessarily make me hopeful, but it does make me feel reassured in some way.

People who haven’t read the book keep asking me, “What’s so weirdly reassuring about it?” And I don’t really know how to explain it. In the book, I just try to recreate the experience that I went through, so that, hopefully, when people get to the end of the book they can have gone through the same range of emotions, so that they also feel weirdly reassured.

Manaugh: As far as the human attitude to wildness goes, I think the role of the child is a fascinating subplot. The idea of the wild, feral child is both fascinating and terrifying in popular culture—I’m thinking of Werner Herzog’s newly restored movie about Kasper Hauser, for example, or about recent newspaper articles in the UK expressing fear about "feral children” starting riots in the streets. It seems like humans want to make children as domesticated as possible, as fast as possible, and that, in a sense, the role of education and acculturation is exactly the task of de-wilding human animals.

Mooallem: I don’t know: among certain people in America right now, it seems as though it’s almost going the other way, that there’s a kind of romanticization of kids as a noble, unspoiled embodiment of nature. We haven’t ruined them yet. That sentiment seems to be actually in opposition to this idea that anything that’s animal-like about a kid is not human.

What was interesting to me is that we surround our kids with all these animal images and stuffed lions and bears and so on, yet no one’s ever really looked at how children conceive of wild animals. We have a lot of research about how a kid might think about their family’s pet dog, for instance, but how does that kid think about a panda bear that they’ll never see?

There was one set of studies done in the 1970s that interviewed a lot of grade school kids about how they thought about wildlife, and the answers were pretty much exactly the opposite of what we like to imagine. The older kids get, the more compassionate they feel toward the wild animals. The younger kids were just horrified and scared and felt very threatened by the animals—which makes perfect sense, of course, because they’re helpless little kids.

In many ways, that’s actually the more “wild” response: the kids are behaving like animals, in the sense that they’re only looking out for their own interests.

I thought that was really funny, in fact, because the whole book came out of a very genuine feeling that it’s really sad that my daughter is going to grow up in a world without polar bears, and, at the same time, a complete inability to understand why that should be so or to rationalize that feeling. After all, she doesn’t interact with polar bears now. Why should she care about polar bears? I think part of that originally inexplicable sense of sadness comes from a romantic place where we want to see children and wild animals as part of the same culture—a culture that’s not us.

Manaugh: What’s interesting, I suppose, with the children, is that we want a kind of animal-like, wild innocence, but only until they reach a certain age.

Mooallem: That actually mirrors this cycle that I write about with a lot of wildlife where we love wild animals when they are helpless and they don’t threaten us, but then we vilify them when they inconvenience us or aren’t under our control.

My daughter is about to turn five, and I’m really glad she doesn’t bite me any more when she gets angry! At the same time, it fills me with a very profound joy when I see her stalking a butterfly on Bernal Hill, because somehow I want her to be connected to that more pure idea of nature. I think that we love wildness and we love that kind of animal nature when it doesn’t inconvenience us—when it’s not biting us in the leg.

California Department of Fish and Wildlife shot three tranquilizer darts into this celebrity mountain lion, found in a Glendale-area backyard, before removing it to Angeles National Forest. Photo: NBC4.

There’s this study in Los Angeles that showed that when there were almost no mountain lions left, people would celebrate them as a part of their natural heritage—the good wild—but then, when mountain lion populations made a bit of a comeback and the lions started intruding into the city and eating pet dogs, people’s attitudes changed and mountain lions were seen as vicious murderers—the bad wild. There is a kind of fickleness: we want it both ways.

In the book, I quote Holly Doremus, who is a brilliant legal scholar based here in Berkeley, who says that we’ve never really decided—or maybe even asked—how much wild nature we need and how much we can accept.

Twilley: What that question brings up to me, too, is the idea of an appropriate context for wildness. One of Rudi Mattoni’s first projects was breeding the Palos Verdes blue butterfly, which was thought to be extinct after its last habitat was covered by a baseball diamond, but was then rediscovered in a field of underground fuel tanks owned by the Department of Defense. I was curious about both the idea of control and the idea of pristine nature, and how both concepts are embedded in our assumptions about wildness.

Mooallem: Right. Pigeons are wild—but they annoy us. Cockroaches are wild. We don’t romanticize or preserve the wild animals that live alongside us and invade spaces that we think of as ours—we exterminate them.

As far as control goes, we want to have our cake and eat it, too. We want something that has nothing to do with us—something that has free rein and that can surprise us and thrill us—but we only want the positive side of that equation. We don’t want the wolves eating our cattle or the sea otters getting in the way of the fishermen. That’s certainly behind some of the extreme lengths we go to in order to create the right context for the animals and to keep them within a certain area that we’ve decided is appropriate for them.

The point of the book is that we’re only going to see more and more examples like the Palos Verde blue and the Lange’s Metalmark, where the last hope for a species is in a seemingly hopeless place. There are only going to be more industrial landscapes—it’s unavoidable. Travis Longcore, who is an urban conservation scientist that I spoke with for the book, makes a really good point, which is that we have to get away from what he calls Biblical thinking—that you’re either in the Garden of Eden or the entire world is fallen. He heads the organization that’s behind a lot of the Antioch Dunes butterfly recovery, and he makes a point of trying to celebrate the wildness of places that make most of us feel queasy.

I think that’s important—I’m not suggesting that we give up on the romantic idea of the places that do seem “pristine,” but I think that we need to be a little more flexible and we need to find the joy and the beauty in those other sorts of places, too.

Twilley: You chose to start the epilogue with a story that seems emblematic: the “species in a bucket” story. What about that story summed up these complex themes you were tackling in the book?

Mooallem: The “species in a bucket” story is about a fish biologist named Phil Pister and a little species of fish called the Owens pupfish. Back in the 1960s, in the Owens Valley, Phil Pister was part of the group who had rediscovered the Owens pupfish—it had been presumed extinct, but he found it living in a desert spring.

One summer—I think it was 1964—there was a drought, and this one desert spring where the fish lived was drying up. Pister ran out there with some of his California Department of Fish & Wildlife buddies, and they moved the fish to a different part of the spring where the water was flowing a little bit better and the fish would have more oxygen.

He sent everyone home thinking it was a job well done, but then, after nightfall, he realized that it wasn’t working. Scores of fish were floating belly up. So he made a snap decision. He got some buckets from his truck, he put all the fish he could into the buckets, he carried them back to his truck, and he drove them across the desert to this other spring where he knew the water was deeper and that they’d survive.

I was drawn to that story because I heard it a few different times and, originally, to be honest, I just didn’t think it was true. It sounded like this almost Biblical, heroic story of a man alone in the desert—and it was always told to me in that way, too. People stressed how miraculous it was and how noble he was, carrying these two buckets full of fish across the desert to save the species. It was almost too perfect of a metaphor—here we are with the fate of all these species in our hands—but it also turned out to be true. I actually went down to Bishop to meet Phil, and he’s a phenomenal guy.

I thought that story should start the epilogue for two reasons. In part, I liked the story for all the same reasons that I thought it wasn’t true—there’s this timelessness to it. A lot of the book is about adding layer after layer of complexity, so the reader feels less and less certainty. It’s not a book that moves toward an answer—it’s more of a book that unravels all the answers that we thought we already knew. So there was something really refreshing and absolving to just take it back to this one man with a bucket, saving a species.

The other reason is that I thought it was a good illustration of this human compulsion to help, which is the underlying driver of so many of the stories in the book. There was something really nice about Phil’s story, in that it didn’t even strike him as that remarkable at the time. Later it did, of course, and he’s written about it, pretty eloquently. But I thought his story got at the fact that we just can’t not do this sort of thing. We can’t not try to solve a problem when it’s in front of us. I found that there’s a real dignity in that.

Even the people I met who were the harshest critics of Endangered Species preservation wanted to help—they just thought the way it was being done was ridiculous or that the politics are ridiculous.

Chairs set up for "craniacs" hoping to witness an Operation Migration flyover, Gilchrist County, Florida. Photo: Jon Mooallem.

Take, for example, all these people up and down Operation Migration’s route who donate their property to let the pilots stay on their land with the whooping cranes. They’re not people that you would think of as environmentalists, but they’re really grateful for this opportunity to help—there’s no red tape, there’s no government surveyor coming in to check their land for endangered species, just a simple way to make a difference for this one species.

I also liked the idea of pairing Phil Pister’s story with Brooke Pennypacker, one of the Operation Migration pilots. For Brooke, this is not a one-night-with-a-bucket deal: he flies a little plane in a bird costume in front of whooping cranes for five months of the year, and then he migrates back with them on land. His whole life is given up to this effort, for the foreseeable future. It’s not a simple problem he’s trying to solve. I found him on a pig farm, where he’d been exiled due to bureaucratic squabbling, and he had FAA inspectors coming to check out his plane. He was just beset by complexity and he was so in touch with the potential futility of it all. He was willing to accept that maybe everything he’s doing isn’t going to make a difference.

That’s the complete opposite of Phil Pister walking across the desert just thinking that all he has to do is move these fish over here and they’ll be fine. In the span of 50 years, we’ve gone from one scenario to the other. But Brooke is doing it because he feels the exact same way Phil did. Brooke told me that he got involved with Operation Migration because it was as if someone had a flat tire on the side of the road and he had a jack in his car. He saw a problem and he knew that he could pull over and help. That’s where it all starts from.

Manaugh: This is a hypothesis in the guise of a question. Most people’s experience of wildlife nowadays is in the form of roadkill or perhaps squirrels nibbling through the phone cable or raccoons in their backyard. It’s very unromantic—whereas pets seem to be getting more and more exotic and strange. There’s a boom in people owning lions or boa constrictors or incredibly rare tropical birds as pets. I’m curious what you think about the role of the pet in terms of our relationship with wild animals, and whether we are turning to increasingly exotic pets in order to replace the wildness we find missing in nature itself.

Mooallem: That’s never occurred to me, but it’s a brilliant point. I’m ashamed to say that I don’t really have a lot to say about pets. I’ve never really had a pet.

My sense is that when you have a dog, the dog is your buddy. Even though it’s a dog, you more or less relate to it as a person. I think that, in that sense, pets are sort of boring to me. But this idea that we’re trying to get our exotic thrills from a pet monkey is interesting. I’ll have to give that some thought.

The stories that interest me as a writer are ones in which people are trying to respond appropriately to something where it’s not clear what the appropriate response is. For a while, I was writing a lot about the dilemma of recycling—you’re holding this can, and you don’t know whether putting it in the recycling bin is smart or whether it just gets shipped off to China. There’s that drive to do the moral thing, but most of us are completely clueless as to what the right thing might be, because of the complexity of the issues.

Wild animals are the perfect example of that kind of situation, because they can’t really tell us what they need—they’re just this black box that our actions get fed into. For some reason, probably some deep Freudian problem, that challenge of trying to do the right thing but ultimately just banging your head against the wall to figure it out is really appealing to me. I really relate to it.

I guess that’s why I’m not really that interested in pets, either. You come to feel that you understand your pet, even if you don’t. There’s not that tension or urge to solve the problem that you get with otters or wolves or buffalo. You house-break your pet and then it’s over.

Manaugh: I wonder, though, if that’s not part of the appeal of getting an exotic animal species as a pet—the promise and the thrill of not understanding it.

Mooallem: At the same time, that’s a feeling that you’ll eventually get bored or annoyed with, and you’ll end up abandoning the pet. I just read that the government is setting up unwanted tortoise drop-offs for owners who want to abandon their pets, just like babies at fire stations. Apparently in some states—Nevada and a few others—there are dozens of desert tortoises being left by their owners by the side of the road.

When a pet monkey goes nuts and the owner gives it up, we tend to look at it as a failure of pet ownership, but maybe they actually wanted that feeling of not understanding the animal, at least at first. It’s an interesting theory.

Twilley: Another group of people who would seem to have a very different but equally complex relationship to wild animals is hunters. That’s a whole segment of Americans who seem to be less troubled about what their relationship should be with wild animals, yet who often end up being at the forefront of conservation movements, in order to save the landscapes in which they hunt. The division is interesting—it seems philosophical, but it’s also maybe class-based?

Mooallem: It’s geographic, definitely. But you’re right: a lot of the stereotypes around hunters break down when you see all the really creative conservation projects that are supported, or even spearheaded, by people who we might normally think of as redneck hunters. The lines are just not clearly defined. You also choose your species—some people are more sympathetic to one species than they are to others.

The other point I was trying to make with the book is that conserving a species or celebrating a species is just another way to use the species. Conservationists always talk about utilitarian values and aesthetic values, but, to me, it’s all the same thing. Some of us want salmon in the Columbia River because we want to fish them, and some of us want salmon there because it’s part of America’s natural glory, or because we’ll feel guilty if they go away. But, in all of those reasons, the salmon are serving human needs.

Those different reasons really come to the surface when a species rebounds. Right now, there’s a huge fight up and down the sandhill crane flyway. They were all but extinct, yet they’ve come back to the point where they’re annoying farmers, and hunters are saying: “Fantastic! They’re back—now I can hunt them with my son again. Success!” And, of course, then there’s an outcry from the birdwatchers and the conservationists who are saying that that’s not why we brought them back. We brought them back so they could be beautiful, not so they could be shot. But these are still just two groups of people who want something out of the bird.

Manaugh: There’s another book that came out recently called Nature Wars—

Mooallem: Yes, I read that.

Manaugh: The author, Jim Sterba, argues that all of our well-intentioned efforts to protect animals have actually allowed deer and beaver and Canada goose populations to explode, and now they’re bringing down our planes and causing car crashes and tearing up our golf courses and so on. He ends up, to my mind, at least, over-emphasizing the point that we need to become hunters again—that the ecosystem is out of balance precisely because it no longer features human predators.

Mooallem: Preserving these species—whether it’s intentional or whether it’s an unintended consequence of habitat changes, as in the case of deer—is an ecological act, and it’s going to have repercussions that we should take responsibility for dealing with. We forget we’re ecological participants. In fact, if Sterba’s book hadn’t been written, I might be thinking about exactly the same issue now. There are so many cases where it’s the rebound or the resurgence that causes the problem, rather than the decline.

The real fallacy is the “leave no trace” attitude. There is no way you’re not leaving a trace, so it’s better simply to be conscious and thoughtful and to take responsibility for what you’re doing.

Somebody asked me the other day about the de-extinction movement, and I had the same response. I don’t know what I think about actually bringing back passenger pigeons, but I think it’s good that people are talking about being proactive and being creative rather than just trying to pretend we don’t have any power.

Of course, it also makes me nervous—as it should, given our environmental history of unintended consequences, having to find solutions for problems that were caused by our own solutions for other problems that we ourselves most likely caused in the first place.

An hour's drive east-southeast of Pittsburgh, hidden among the picturebook-perfect red barns, white fences, and green fields of the Lignonier Valley, lies an equally carefully maintained landscape of bird research—a nature preserve whose ponds and wildflowers have been augmented with mist nets, field microphones, a songbird recording booth, and a one-of-a-kind rotating flight tunnel.

On a recent morning, Venue joined researchers Luke DeGroote, Amy Tegeler, Mary Shidel, Kate Johnston, and Matt Webb, as well as several dozen warblers, catbirds, and a cuckoo, for a tour of the various devices of bird surveillance at the Powdermill Avian Research Center (PARC), part of Carnegie Museum of Natural History's Powdermill Nature Reserve.

Founded in 1961, PARC is the longest-continuously running bird banding station in the United States, and has assembled one of North America's largest census data sets on migratory songbird populations. Six days a week during the spring and fall (and only slightly less often during the winter and summer), DeGroote and his team head out before dawn to unfurl the Center's 61, forty-foot long, eight-foot tall nylon mesh mist-nets.

Over the course of the morning, until either the temperature reaches 78 degrees or the time hits 11 a.m., whichever comes first, these superfine, over-sized volleyball nets form a network of barely visible barriers stretched between trees, along the banks of artificial ponds, and hanging parallel to overgrown hedgerows, trapping both droplets of dew and unwitting birds from the atmosphere.

The majority of the nets have stood in the same place for the past half-century, raised and lowered each day to create a sort of avian calendar, marked by the arrival and departure of different species within the northern Appalachian landscape. Indeed, as we accompanied DeGroote on his rounds, he noted that the preponderance of warblers signaled that the spring migration was drawing to a close.

While carefully untangling a Kentucky Warbler and a stunning Scarlet Tanager (the first male of the season, apparently) from the first net, and stowing them in cloth bags attached to a system of color-coded carabiners he wore on a chain around his neck, DeGroote explained that the landscape is pruned and maintained to remain as similar as possible to its 1970s "early successional" state: arrested in a state of post-agricultural regrowth that will never be allowed to mature into secondary forest. The more things the banders can keep the same within their own research ecology, the more valuable their data becomes for detecting changes in bird populations and behavior. It is both a control landscape, anchoring the variables of the various experiments, and a landscape of control.

Bird-banding, we quickly realized, does not make for a relaxing morning. Every minute spent away from its normal activities eats into a bird's valuable refueling and breeding opportunities, so PARC's operation is set up with assembly-line efficiency. Back at the banding station, DeGroote and his colleagues unhooked bird bags from their necks and hooked them onto a washing-line pulley for processing.

PARC catches roughly 13,000 birds each year (their up-to-date tallies are posted online), 3,000 of which are recaptures. The other 7,000 need to be issued with a unique 9-digit number ("bird Social Security," joked DeGroote), which they will carry with them for the rest of their lives on a small aluminum cuff gently fitted around one leg. On the wall, behind the bird pulley, was a map showing all the places PARC bands have been reported, with sightings as far afield as Peru.

DeGroote held a bird in one hand and typed with the other, measuring and entering data on weight and wing length, all the while continuing a running commentary on sage grouce dance-offs, the particular chirrup a bird makes when it is released ("like it's saying 'potato chip'"), and the dietary choices to blame for the cuckoo's notorious stink (too many caterpillars). By blowing gently on the birds' stomachs, he revealed more data points: their fat stores (visible through translucent skin) and breeding condition.

The only pause in the otherwise seamless process came when trying to determine the birds' age. The quality of their feathers is apparently the main giveaway—baby birds grow all of their feathers in a hurry so that they can get out of the nest, and then have to regrow some to a higher standard. The difference is almost impossible for a novice to spot—the juvenile feathers have slightly less of sheen, and the plumage pattern is muddier—and it is sometimes quite challenging even for experts.

As we watched, hypnotized by the banding team's practiced, economical motions, PARC's bird processing line ground to a brief halt over the cuckoo, whose spotted tail feathers were of inconclusive quality. DeGroote pulled down a reference book to look for additional clues before playing it safe with a broad "older than two years" designation, and swinging smoothly back into action.

Even the architecture had been modified to account for this avian activity: a small hole in the wall, complete with a sliding panel, acted as a quick-release hatch for any birds not destined for additional research. With the banding as its baseline activity, PARC balances releasing birds quickly with the opportunity to conduct additional research, and this season was also hosting a West Nile virus swabbing station, as well as its own ongoing programs for flight tunnel and bioacoustic research.

We accompanied Amy Tegeler, the bioacoustics program manager, over to her recording studio, with a gorgeous and talkative black, orange, and yellow American Redstart in tow.

In addition to its mist nets, the landscape around PARC is also miked, with three pole-mounted "sky ear" recording devices, based on a simple plastic flowerpot design originally developed by Bill Evans.

As they migrate, most songbirds emit short, single-note nocturnal flight calls. No one, Tegeler explained, is quite sure why they do this—she likened it to trying to make a phone call while running a marathon—although the generally accepted hypothesis is that it has to do with maintaining flock spacing and cohesion.

Researchers are not only interested in learning about these nocturnal calls for their own sake, however: the idea behind PARC's bioacoustics program is that, by using software to analyze recordings of the nocturnal soundscape, it will be possible to conduct a remote, automated census of migration and species numbers.

This, Tegeler was quick to explain, won't replace bird banding. Instead, a bioacoustic survey can pick up species that aren't often caught in nets, can be used in environments that would be difficult for humans to reach or set up nets in the first place (remote rainforest and cities, for example), and offers the opportunity to conduct lower-resolution counts across a larger landscape (perhaps even as a citizen science effort—the microphone costs about $50 to make out of parts readily available at a hardware store and RadioShack).

While exciting, the technique is still in its infancy, and the Raven Pro software that Tegeler uses to extract flight calls from the hours of night recordings—cross-species cryptanalysis as app—also flags, unfortunately, each and every raindrop impact as a bird. After spring migration season, Tegeler estimates that she ends up with 75,000 audio clips, only 5,000-10,000 of which are actually calls. Sorting through the terabytes of data takes months.

To help improve the call identification process, PARC has built a custom-designed bird recording studio, which it uses to capture a "Rosetta Stone" library of "clean" nocturnal flight calls, to replace the fuzzier field recordings currently used as reference.

To demonstrate, Tegeler dropped our Redstart into an "acoustic cone" (actually a black-out fabric cylinder built from a long-sleeved T-shirt and two embroidery hoops from Jo-Ann), hung it between four mics in a soundproof booth, closed the door, and sat down at the control desk with her headphones on. The whole set-up looked like something Paul McCartney might use to re-record a vocal track—that is, if he liked to sing suspended in mid-air in complete darkness.

With her headphones on, Tegeler played our avian rock star two minutes of American Redstart nocturnal flight calls recorded in the field, interspersed with silence, and the croak of a spring peeper frog as a control. From within the booth, the bird responded to the calls with four high-pitched squeaks—in the process, yielding a perfectly clean recording for Tegeler and other researchers in her field to work with.

With most common birds recorded, this migration season, Tegeler has been collecting data to try to establish what other information, beyond species identification, is embedded in nocturnal flight calls.

"There are patterns to the calls, but we don't yet understand why, or what they mean," Tegeler explains, adding that the calls themselves can be separated into distinct types, named for their sound: buzzy, zeep, upsweep, downsweep, and chip. An entire acoustic ecosystem awaits decoding: some species will respond to other species' flight calls, others, for reasons known only to themselves, won't; and Tegeler can detect variations within a species' calls, based on an individual bird's age and sex.

Diagram showing the moon-watching technique developed by George H. Lowery Jr from Gatherings of Angels: Migrating Birds and Their Ecology, edited by Kenneth P. Able. The original caption explains that "as birds cross the disk of the moon their flight paths are coded as 'in' and 'out' times on an imaginary clockface. All paths are then analyzed to produce a migration traffic rate—the number of birds crossing 1.6km per hour."

Astonishingly, before bioacoustic research got started just a few decades ago, the only way to gather data on nocturnal bird migrations was a technique called "moon-watching," in which researchers and volunteers would point a telescope at a full moon from twilight until dawn, counting and identifying birds silhouetted against its disk.

Now, nocturnal flight call surveys are matched with radar bioscatter analysis in a new scientific discipline called "aeroecology," or the study of the planetary boundary layer and lower free atmosphere as a biological ecosystem.

From the ways in which humans use invisible information to see birds, we moved to the bird's final stop in their short, PARC-assisted detour—a device designed to test how birds see human infrastructure.

Clouds reflected in the Time-Warner Center towers in New York City (left) and a temptingly plant-filled glass atrium (bottom left) are among Christine Sheppard's collection of bird-unfriendly buildings. In her caption to the top right image, Sheppard notes that "architectural cues show people that only one panel on the face of this shelter is open; to birds, all the panels appear to be open." All photographs by Christine Sheppard, American Bird Conservancy.

Birds killed by building collisions, collected by monitors with FLAP (Fatal Light Awareness Program) in Toronto, photograph by Kenneth Herdy, via the American Bird Conservancy.

Sheppard's goal is to measure "relative threat values" for different kinds of glass patterns or finishes, in order to develop a recommendation for the most bird-visible (and thus bird-friendly) glass. And the device she has designed to do that is extraordinary: a stretched-out shed combined with the trompe-l'oeil trickery of a Baroque cathedral.

Matt Webb, the technician in charge of these bird/window strike-avoidance studies, retrieved a bagged Grey Catbird from the banding station ("they love flying in the tunnel"), in order to show us how the system works. He released the Catbird from its bag into a tiny hole at one end of the tunnel, and, as it flew down the ten meter-long darkened shed, a video camera recorded the bird flying toward the plain glass control panel covering half of the tunnel's other end, rather than the crazy-paving patterned glass on its right.

As we braced sympathetically, anticipating impact, the bird was saved by an invisible mist net (the same kind the banding team use). It hopped about in the felt-lined tunnel, completely unharmed and making the miaow-ing sound for which the species is named, while Webb logged the result, walked around to the side, opened a small door in the tunnel wall, and released it.

This particular manufacturer's "bird-friendly" glass, Webb told us, has a 73 percent avoidance rate, meaning that out of 120 tunnel test flights (each using a different bird), 88 had presumably seen the pattern, and chosen to avoid it by flying toward the clear—and hence invisible—glass to the left.

Not all birds are suitable research subjects, Webb explained: Yellow Warblers "get confused" and fly around in all directions; our vocal friend the American Redstart often sees the safety net, rending the whole test moot; and House Sparrows and other cavity-nesting birds simply make themselves at home in one of the tunnel's dark corners.

The tunnel itself is an experimental prototype: it is based on a design originally created by Austrian scientist Martin Rössler to test free-standing glass panels used in highway barriers, and Sheppard is already fine-tuning the next-generation tunnel from her base in the Bronx.

Briefly, it is worth noting some resonances here between Sheppard's architectural design for tracking and framing bird flight and a body of much earlier work done by bio-media pioneers such as Étienne Jules-Marey, who performed his own controlled studies of bird flight.

Jules-Marey's work combined innovations in multi-lens camera design and wearable media for birds with an interest in the science of flight to produce astonishing documents of animal bodies in motion.

These often took surreal form, including a proposal for hooking birds up to a machine that could register individual wing beats.

In any case, at the moment, Sheppard's current flight-monitoring structure is mounted on a turntable so that it can follow the sun, thus ensuring that its mirrors bounce sunlight onto the front of the glass at the same angle all morning. Inside the tunnel, and for the birds that fly through it, it is always the same time of day.

When we followed up with her by phone, Sheppard explained that this feature, while ingenious, is not perfect:

On a cloudy day, for example, you're going to have a break in the clouds that's nowhere near the location of the sun, but it's still the brightest part in the sky, and that will throw the reflections off.

One of the things that we're most interested in studying is ultraviolet patterns, because birds can see UV and we can't, but the mirrors we're using to reflect light onto the glass surface take out more of the UV in light than they do other wavelengths. At the moment, our flight tunnel handicaps the UV patterns.

In Sheppard's new design, the entire tunnel is housed in a shipping container, which allows for a much more closely controlled, and potentially more sophisticated, set of lighting parameters, in which an array of "daylight" and UV bulbs can be set up to mimic a variety of natural solar conditions.

The shipping container also weather-proofs the structure: although we visited on a sunny, calm morning, the current tunnel has been known to pivot with a sudden gust, giving bystanders a nasty shock.

Most important, however, is the fact that the new tunnel will increase capacity. "With only one tunnel," explains Sheppard, "we actually can't do enough testing to conduct our own research and test prototypes for glass companies that are trying to develop products for bird-friendly design. And, because we definitely want to encourage the market for bird-friendly products, we've been doing a lot of commercial testing over the last two years."

Even as scientists move toward a better understanding of avian perception (Sheppard told us of one project to build a model of the avian retina using a digital camera equipped with a series of specially designed filters), they still can't necessarily model how the bird will react to that visual information—"the 'what do the birds think about this?' question," as Sheppard puts it.

Will a bird think it can go through a space in between stripes? What about if the lines are diagonal? Will birds perceive a cobweb pattern as an obstacle?

Although the American Bird Association already knows (and recommends) several strategies for bird-friendly design, their goal is not to arrive at a single avian-endorsed glass solution. Instead, Sheppard says:

What we want is to create the situation where architects have maximum flexibility, and they don't feel like bird-friendly design is a burden. We're not trying to get them to stop using glass, and we're not trying to make them to design ugly buildings; we want to give them lots of different possibilities. To do that, we have to ask these birds a lot of different questions.

In other words, PARC's spinning, elongated garden shed, with its trompe l'oeil sky, wing mirrors, and slide-in glass panels, is a cross-species translation tool—a structural device designed to test whether the built environment makes perceptual sense both to people and to birds.

As the last stop on our tour of this well-oiled bird surveillance machine disguised as a nature reserve, the flight tunnel provided an intriguing counter-perspective, asking, in this artificially shaped landscape disguised as a natural preserve, how birds see our habitat and what their perceptual frame might require from our own future designs.

Every apple for sale at your local supermarket is a clone. Every single Golden Delicious, for example, contains the exact same genetic material; though the original Golden Delicious tree (discovered in 1905, on a hillside in Clay County, West Virginia) is now gone, its DNA has become all but immortal, grafted onto an orchard of clones growing on five continents and producing more than two hundred billion pounds of fruit each year in the United States alone.

Embedded within this army of clones, however, is the potential for endless apple diversity. Each seed in an apple is genetically unique: like human siblings, seed sisters from the same fruit remix their source DNA into something that has never been seen before—and is likely, at least in the case of the apple, to be bitter, tough, and altogether unpalatable. The sheer variety of wild apples is astonishing: in its original home, near Almaty in Kazakhstan, the apple can be the size of a cherry or a grapefruit; it can be mushy or so hard it will chip teeth; it can be purple- or pink-fleshed with green, orange, or white skin; and it can be sickly sweet, battery-acid sour, or taste like a banana.

Tasting apples at the Plant Genetic Resources Unit; photograph by Jessica Rath from her 2009 visit.

In Geneva, New York, these two extremes—the domesticated apple's endless monoculture and its wild diversity—can be found side-by-side. As part of the national germplasm system, America's apple archivist, Philip Forsline, has assembled and tended a vast Noah's Ark of more than 2,500 apple varieties: two clones of each, in order to preserve the fruit's genetic biodiversity. Meanwhile, on the same Cornell/USDA Agricultural Experiment Station, Susan Brown, one of the country's three commercial apple breeders, develops new clones by cultivating wildly different seed sisters.

Rath's original goal was to create slip cast porcelain sculptures that embodied the incredible—and now endangered—range of the apple's aesthetic potential; revealing the charms and qualities it has developed through co-evolution with humans as a reflection of our own desires and will. During her visit, however, Rath also became fascinated by the conjoined twin of Forsline's apple archive: Brown's speculative sisters and successful, selected clones, which she photographed as bare-branched trees against a white backdrop.

Intrigued by the idea of artwork that reflects on the complicated threads of selection and preservation that bind humans and apples together, Venue toured the exhibition with Rath. The edited transcript of our conversation, which ranges from the trickiness of Vegas Red glaze to the future of apple breeding, appears below.

• • •

PI 588933.12 (unnamed cluster); photographed on the tree by Jessica Rath during her 2009 visit.

Jessica Rath: I read about it in Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire. The first chapter is about apples, and he visits the orchard in Geneva. I read that section and I knew I needed to make work about it. I don’t do that very often but that passage, where he writes about the variety of the apples and the way they look and taste… I wanted to make something as intriguing as that—I wanted to get you to feel that crazy diversity. I sat on that for years. I wanted to go there, but I had no idea how I was going to make work about it.

I just bookmarked it, and then my apricot tree died. I made a peel—an inverted mold, I guess—of this dying tree, and I made a slip cast of its one, last fruit. I’ve changed mediums constantly in my practice—I usually do site-specific installations or I do performance work—but I talked to some sculptor friends to find out how to create a sort of glowing, golden aura for this last apricot, and they all said slip cast porcelain. So I made it, and I looked at it and, and I thought, that’s not it. That’s not good enough. But it did glow. And that’s what made me think I was ready to do something with the apples. I thought, if I can make them glow, then I can make this work. So that’s when I raised some money on Kickstarter to be able to get there.

That was the other piece of the puzzle that fell into place. My daughter was a baby and I hadn’t read anything in months, but I was on a flight and I picked up The New York Times, and there was an article about Kickstarter. I went home, I raised money on Kickstarter, and I got it about a month before the end of apple season; so I raced over to the Plant Genetic Resources Unit for a forty-eight hour visit.

Scouting for apples at the Plant Genetic Resources Unit; photograph by Jessica Rath from her 2009 visit.

I learned a lot while just scouting on the first day, from a man named William Srmack who manages the orchards and works directly with Philip Forsline, who’s the curator of the collection. On the second day, I just collected apples. I brought home several hundred apples. Part of the Kickstarter money bought an extra refrigerator for the studio and I loaded it and kept it pretty cold. I took a lot of photos of the fruit on the tree, and in a light box, too.

PI 483254.22 (unnamed—sunset cluster); photographed on the tree by Jessica Rath during her 2009 visit.

Twilley: Let’s look at the sculptures. If I understand correctly, although each pair or cluster represents a different breed, they’re not casts of specific, particular apples, but rather abstracted, ideal forms—or ur-apples—that embody the breed’s characteristic shape and color.

Rath: Exactly. With slip cast porcelain, you lose thirty percent of the volume when you fire. So, even if you wanted to do a cast of the original apple, you couldn’t get the same scale because it would be shrunk by thirty percent, which not only makes it too small, it also miniaturizes the features. It makes it kind of a caricature. It isn’t just small, it’s cartoonish. So it doesn’t work.

I already knew I had to make an object thirty percent larger in order to get the scale right. But the other thing is that I didn’t want to make something descriptive. I wanted to make something that communicated something about the wild diversity of these apples and the ways that they embody different facets of our desires through the science fiction of breeding—the thing Michael Pollan is writing about.

When you describe things accurately in a botanical drawing sort of way, it dies. When artwork is too illustrative, it can only describe and it can’t go any further than that. You recognize it and then you stop being interested. You’re amazed at the replication, you’re amazed at the representation, but then you actually can’t think about it as anything other than its finite definition.

A Yellow Bellflower photographed on the tree by Jessica Rath during her 2009 visit. The Yellow Bellflower is thought to have originated in Burlington, New Jersey, and is still grown as an heirloom variety today. It is described as a "large, handsome, winter apple" that is equally delicious when used for cidering, baking, or eating out of hand.

For my sculptures, the shapes are very similar to the original. They’re just pushed a little, so that the things about them—the sculptural elements about them, their particular volume or tilt, or how fat and breast-like they are—are composed three-dimensionally in such a way that you notice them a bit more, and they pop a little. They’re not on a tree. They’re not something that’s dangling that you want to pick because you want to eat it; so, instead, I have to make them attractive through a very different model—an art historical model. I’ve got to present them like they’re a still-life, and compose them in that framework, so that you can be intrigued by them again the way you would be if you saw them as a fruit on a tree.

Yellow Bellflower, Jessica Rath, high-fire glazed porcelain, 2012. Rath explained that she focused on the Bellflower's "fantastic curves and lilts. It was very muscular—even beefy—to the point where it felt almost as though it shouldn't be called an apple, but rather some other fruit instead."

Geoff Manaugh: In the exhibition brochure, it says it took two years of experimentation to arrive at these glazes. Can you talk a bit more about that chemical process?

Rath: In ceramics, there are low-fire glazes, which are very descriptive. They stay the same color. Then the high-fire glazes have more of a glow to them. They also just have a lot of materials in them, and are a lot more unpredictable. You’ve probably seen it at pottery stalls at the fair: when you look at all the mugs or plates or whatever that have all been dunked in one kind of cerulean blue, they will all have turned out slightly different. Some of them will be light blue or whiter or purplish, depending on where they were in the kiln and how thick the glaze was on it and how it dripped.

I originally did that apricot, that last fruit, in a low-fire glaze. But for the apples, I steered away from being that descriptive with the glazes because they died for me, except for ones in which I would layer quite a few low-fire glazes. There’s this fuzzy speckling you can get in low-fire, which I wanted.

Normally, you would make little rectangular tiles of clay and you’d fire it and you’d have fifty little things to test the glaze on, till you got roughly what you want. But these apples are round and irregular rather than flat, and the glaze moves on them in very particular ways depending on the size and the angles of their curves, so I couldn’t test on strips. I had to test on the object.

This one [shown above], the Deacon Jones, probably took one hundred tests. This was the hardest one, even though it’s the straightest glaze. All of the others are tweaked a little, but the glaze on this is pretty straight. It’s called Vegas Red and it does get this red but usually only in parts or pieces, say, at the bottom of the bowl. It doesn’t stay a solid red. And it also drips. So to get it to actually sit there and get this red all over is one out of one hundred, if you’re lucky.

It’s also down to a very, very close relationship with the ceramic technician that took about two years to build, so that after two years of watching me fail over and over again, he put it in a sweet spot in the kiln. He’s Japanese, and he’s pretty old-school, and I think he thought I had finally worked hard enough that I deserved a sweet spot. There’s only one or two of them in the kiln. All of a sudden I got three perfectly red apples in a month. I knew I was improving over time, but it was that relationship, too.

This is an unnamed apple [shown above], which is based on trees in the orchard that were grafted from wild apples in Kazakhstan, from the original home of the apple. It’s low-fire over high-fire. I was interested in this sort of speckling blush that they had, but then the blush took over. My approach was to get to a point with the experimentation where I found something that grabbed me and then let it go with that and work with that.

Twilley: That sounds a little like the apple breeding process.

Rath: Yes—I found a quality I liked and then I bred and bred to refine it, essentially. This is a Dulcina, which is another one with a blush that I arrived at while I was trying to get the rest of it into a more green or yellowish stage. I loved the metaphor of the night sky that’s held in it, so I just went for that.

Dulcina, Jessica Rath, high-fire glazed porcelain, 2012.

There’s supposed to be an edition of two of each of these apples, and I’m unable to replicate this one. It’s the last one. I’m still working on it. After you leave, I’ll go up to the kiln again. The idea of producing an edition of two is an odd one in sculpture, but it made sense for the apples: they’re always planted in pairs in the orchard, as a Noah’s Ark idea—in case something happens to one.

Whiteness, Jessica Rath, high-fire glazed porcelain, 2012.

These final ones [shown above] are very, very pale yellow on the tree and when the sun hits them they turn white. You know that they’re yellow, but when you’re in this orchard, things look different. I’ve described it to people as being like when you go fishing, and when you catch a fish, it has a certain glimmer to the skin while it’s alive. As soon as you kill it, as soon as it’s dead, the whole sheen shifts into a kind of grey. The depth of the color is not the same. It’s immediate.

PI 594107.j5 (unnnamed—whiteness), photographed on the tree by Jessica Rath during her 2009 visit.

I swear that these apples have the same thing. There’s something about them when they’re on the tree—they have this luminosity. As soon as you pick them, the depth of the color isn’t there, and the whiteness is just a pale yellow. You can’t capture it in a photograph, either. That’s why I chose ceramics. I’ve no business doing any ceramics. I’ve never done it before. I’m a sculptor, but sculptors and ceramicists are usually in separate departments. But when I saw what the glazes could do, I thought that I could catch that life again.

Porcelain vitrifies—it turns to glass with the glaze—which means that the body of the sculpture and the color that’s applied, this glaze, become one body. That’s a technical thing, but it’s also real and aesthetic. In sculpture, that doesn’t happen. You can use car body paint to make something glow and shift in the light, but it’s always applied, and in ceramics the color and the body become one. I had a whole series of fifteen years of work where I never used color because I always thought, what’s the point? It’s not part of the body of the work; it’s just applied.

Twilley: Did you take the tree photographs in the show at the same time, or is that a separate project?

Rath: While I was at the Plant Genetics Resource Unit, I got a call from this woman, Susan Brown. I don’t even know how she got hold of me, but thank god she did. She said, “You need to come over here, because I’ve got these trees and you need to see them.” It turns out she’s one of only three commercial apple breeders in the United States, and her job is to cross apple varieties to improve them and create the next Jonagold.

And I said, “I’m really busy. I’ve got 48 hours. I’m really into these apples.” And she just said, “Get the rest of your apples and come over here. We’ve got three hours before the sun sets.”

I don’t know why I said yes. I was just very lucky. She picked me up in her truck and she showed me a row of cloned trees. It was October, so all of the leaves were still on the trees, and she hadn’t pruned them, because she wants to see what the architecture will do if it’s not touched. It was just this big row of green, and I couldn’t really see anything.

So then she took me to another row of trees that were just saplings. They had some leaves, but not many, because they were so young. Every single one of them had a different architecture—some of them were weeping, some were standing upright, some of them had branches like corkscrew or at perfect right angles. It was like a carnival. They were just different bodies, different leaves, and different sheens to the leaf. She said, “This is what happens when you cross.” Then I got it.

She took me back to her office and showed me a big binder—she had been photographing her trees for years. She understood her trees as artwork, and she wanted somebody else to have a conversation with about that.

She had tried to stretch these sheets behind trees in the winter, and I thought—that’s it! I need to do that, but I need to do it really, really well. So I applied for a grant to go back and photograph Susan’s trees in winter.

I came back about a year and a half later. Susan and I spent a day scouting, then we shot for three days. I was trying to not only show the architecture and the diversity, but also what I wanted in terms of understanding her work, and the difference between the sisters and the clones. The sisters had this extreme variety, but when I went back, I fell in love with the clones. They were all covered in leaves before; I couldn’t really see them. But when I went back in winter, they seemed to not embody the diversity but rather, instead, embody this kind of limiting figure, this figure that had been worked on, that had been “improved” by humans, and that was beautiful but also really haunting.

Some of them are bred for their architecture, but lots of them are bred for other qualities—resistance to browning or disease, high yield, or taste—and are kept alive despite their architecture. Susan told me that they’re on the cusp of moving to quite a different way of breeding, using genetic markers, so, in the future, she probably won’t have rows and rows of such extreme variety. She’ll have more control.

That idea of artificial selection versus natural selection, and the way that certain varieties become weaker, but yet more common, because they’ve entangled humans into maintaining them—that was something I was thinking about before I went to graduate school. I was working with flora in general, but I couldn’t figure out a way to get plants to talk, and so I gave up and moved on. Then, when I read The Botany of Desire, after fifteen years of staying away from the topic, it was as if Pollan had given me a voice for them—an imaginary voice in which they’re drawing us in through aesthetics and through taste in order to get us to reproduce them. Finally, I felt as though I could have a discussion with plants—that they had agency.

Manaugh: It’s interesting that the sisters are all shown in group portraits, whereas the clones are shot on their own, as individuals. Was that a conscious decision, and, if so, what was the intention behind it?

Rath: It was interesting—I tried to shoot the clones as a group, but they just became a landscape. It just seemed that the way to show the clones was as an adult, as something that you would pull material from that had lived a life already, that was full of its own, carefully constructed shape already, and that had certain defined characteristics. I wanted it to capture the potential of using it for these breeding experiments. Meanwhile, the sisters are all about the variety.

From left to right, Cole Slutsky, Mary Wingfield, Timothy Zwicky, and Dustin McKibben set up the 20 x 30 ft backdrop for the photograph Water Sprout; photograph courtesy Jessica Rath.

Backdrop set up for Clone with central leader; photograph courtesy Jessica Rath.

The set up was tortuous. I was using a twenty-by-thirty-foot muslin backdrop. There were five people holding it down, the wind was gusting—it could have killed all of us. There was a photographer, the photographer’s assistant, and me all shooting. We had computer equipment tethered to everything and the rows of trees are not very far apart, so we were really squeezed in to get enough distance. And it was early March, so it was unbelievably cold.

I love this one [shown above], particularly because the horizon almost appears like it is an actual horizon, not just one created by the backdrop. For a second, you could think is there a cliff on the other side of the tree. And yet, behind the backdrop, the landscape is present in a sort of ghostlike way. For me, that’s part of the idea—that the landscape is constructed only as much as you need it to be in order to make the thing live.

I also love the fact that there are allusions to the wind that’s there through the folds and ripples. I spent a lot of time working on these images in Photoshop, after the fact, cropping out and removing things—stray branches from other trees, and so on—that distracted from the composition. But I deliberately kept some of the ripples, because I liked the evidence of the physical tension in the landscape. It’s also part of pointing to the artifice. The backdrop doesn’t disappear, and so you remain aware that the whole thing is a construction.

The title of this one, Clone with early pubescence, [shown above] alludes to the fact that it’s budding too early, so it’s about to get cut down. It’s already dead to Susan, because it has no use. As we walked around, she was telling me about each of the trees—what will happen to them, or what is promising about them, or what she has used them for—and those stories definitely crept into the way I chose to frame and title the shots.

Twilley: Finally, I’m curious about your next project. I’ve heard a rumor that you’re working on something to do with bees—is that true?

Rath: Yes—well, tomatoes or bees. I loved Barry Estabrook’s Tomatoland. The idea of shipping tomatoes from Florida to New York in 1880, in a wagon? It’s crazy! [laughs] I’m doing a series of watercolors of tomatoes right now, which are very different than this. They combine scientific text with quotes from literature about redness, and blushes, and scarlet letters—all about how colors have been used to place judgment on things, and the gendered language that goes with that. There are a lot of “wenches” and “whores” in that series as well. Tasteless whores, too, because some of them are grocery-bought tomatoes. I’m playing with language like that with this series, which is a very different kind of playing than in this apple project—much less subtle.

The bee idea involves visiting Dr. Nieh’s laboratory in San Diego. He’s a bee expert and he has figured out all these incredible ways that bees are communicating, to which he’s given wonderful names like superorganism inhibitory signaling and olfactory eavesdropping.

I’m interested in doing an installation of a hive. It would be to human scale, and it would play with the biofeedback of the people in the hive, and how they interact, as well as the atmospheric conditions. The idea is to create a composition based on all those inputs that shifts in real-time, all based on the scientific research of Dr. Nieh into how bees communicate. I’m looking for a composer to work with on that right now.

When European farmers arrived in North America, they claimed it with fences. Fences were the physical manifestation of a belief in private ownership and the proper use of land—enclosed, utilized, defended—that continues to shape the American way of life, its economic aspirations, and even its form of government.

Today, fences are the framework through the national landscape is seen, understood, and managed, forming a vast, distributed, and often unquestioned network of wire that somehow defines the "land of the free" while also restricting movement within it.

In the 1870s, the U.S. faced a fence crisis. As settlers ventured away from the coast and into the vast grasslands of the Great Plains, limited supplies of cheap wood meant that split-rail fencing cost more than the land it enclosed. The timely invention of barbed wire in 1874 allowed homesteaders to settle the prairie, transforming its grassland ecology as dramatically as the industrial quantities of corn and cattle being produced and harvested within its newly enclosed pastures redefined the American diet.

In Las Cruces, New Mexico, Venue met with Dean M. Anderson, a USDA scientist whose research into virtual fencing promises equally radical transformation—this time by removing the mile upon mile of barbed wire stretched across the landscape. As seems to be the case in fencing, a relatively straightforward technological innovation—GPS-equipped free-range cows that can be nudged back within virtual bounds by ear-mounted stimulus-delivery devices—has implications that could profoundly reshape our relationships with domesticated animals, each other, and the landscape.

In fact, after our hour-long conversation, it became clear to Venue that Anderson, a quietly-spoken federal research scientist who admits to taping a paper list of telephone numbers on the back of his decidedly unsmart phone, keeps exciting if unlikely company with the vanguard of the New Aesthetic, writer and artist James Bridle's term for an emerging way of perceiving (and, in this case, apportioning) digital information under the influence of the various media technologies—satellite imagery, RFID tags, algorithmic glitches, and so on—through which we now filter the world.

The Google Maps rainbow plane, an iconic image of the New Aesthetic for the way in which it accidentally captures the hyperspectral oddness of new representational technologies and image-compression algorithms on a product intended for human eyes.

After all, Anderson's directional virtual fencing is nothing less than augmented reality for cattle, a bovine New Aesthetic: the creation of a new layer of perceptual information that can redirect the movement of livestock across remote landscapes in real-time response to lines humans can no longer see. If gathering cows on horseback gave rise to the cowboy narratives of the West, we might ask in this context, what new mythologies might Anderson's satellite-enabled, autonomous gather give rise to?

Our discussion ranged from robotic rats and sheep laterality to the advantages of GPS imprecision and the possibility of high-tech herds bred to suit the topography of particular property. The edited transcript appears below.

• • •

Nicola Twilley: I thought I'd start with a really basic question, which is why you would want to make a virtual fence rather than a physical one. After all, isn’t the role of fencing to make an intangible, human-determined boundary into a tangible one, with real, physical effects?

Dean M. Anderson: Let me put it this way, in really practical terms: When it comes to managing animals, every conventional fence that I have ever built has been in the wrong place the next year.

That said, I always kid people when I give a talk. I say, “Don't go out and sell your U.S. Steel stock—because we are still going to need conventional fencing along airport runways, interstates, railroad right-of-ways, and so on.” The reason why is because, when you talk about virtual fencing, you're talking about modifying animal behavior.

Then I always ask this question of the audience: “Is there anybody who will raise their hand, who is one hundred percent predictable, one hundred percent of the time?”

The thing about animal behavior is that it’s not one hundred percent predictable, one hundred percent of the time. We don’t know all of the integrated factors that go into making you turn left, when you leave the building, rather than right and so on. Once you realize that virtual fencing is capitalizing on modifying animal behavior, then you also realize that if there are any boundaries that, for safety or health reasons, absolutely cannot be breached, then virtual fencing is not the methodology of choice.

I always start with that disclaimer. Now, to get back to your question about why you’d want to make a virtual fence: On a worldwide basis, animal distribution remains a challenge, whether it’s elephants in Africa or Hereford cows in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

You will have seen this, although you may not have recognized exactly what you were looking at. For example, if you fly into Albuquerque or El Paso airports, you will come in quite low over rangeland. If you see a drinking water location, you will see that the area around that watering point looks as brown and devoid of vegetation as the top of this table, whereas, out at the far distance from the drinking water, there may be plants that have never seen a set of teeth, a jaw, or any utilization at all.

So you have the problem of non-uniform utilization of the landscape, with some places that are over utilized and other places that are underutilized. The over utilized locations with exposed soil are then vulnerable to erosion from wind and water, which then lead to all sorts of other challenges for those of us who want to be ecologically correct in our thinking and management actions.

Even as a college student, animal distribution was something that I was taught was challenging and that we didn't have an answer to. In fact, I recently wrote a review article that showed that, just in the last few years, we have used more than sixty-eight different strategies to try to affect distribution. These include putting a fence in, developing drinking water in a new location, putting supplemental feed in different locations, changing the times you put out feed, putting in artificial shade, so that animals would move to that location—there are a host of things that we have tried. And they all work under certain conditions. Some of them work even better when they’re used synergistically. There are a lot of combinations—whatever n factorial is for sixty-eight.

But one thing that all of them basically don’t allow is management in real time. This is a challenge. Think of this landscape—the Chihuahuan desert, which, by the way, is the largest desert in North America. If you’ve been here during our monsoon, when we (sometimes) receive our mean annual nine-inches plus of precipitation, you’ll see that where Nicola is sitting, she can be soaking wet, while Geoff and I, just a few feet away, stay bone dry. Precipitation patterns in this environment can be like a knife cut.

Students learning rangeland analysis at the Chihuahuan Desert Rangeland Research Center; photograph by J. Victor Espinoza for NMSU Agricultural Communications.

You can see that, with conventional fencing, you might have your cows way over on the western perimeter of your land, while the rainfall takes place along the other edge. In two weeks, where that rain has fallen, we are going to have a flush of annuals coming up, which would provide high-quality nutrition. But, if you have the animals clear over three pastures away, then you’ve got to monitor the rainfall-related growth, and you’ve got to get labor to help round those animals up and move them over to this new location.

You can see how, many times as a manager, you might actually know what to do to optimize your utilization, but economics and time prevent it from happening. Which means your cows are all in the wrong place. It’s a lose-lose, rather than a win-win.

One of Dean Anderson's colleagues, Derek Bailey, herds cattle the old-fashioned way on NMSU's Chihuahuan Desert Rangeland Research Center. One aspect of Bailey's research is testing whether targeted grazing, made possible through Anderson's GPS collar technology, could reduce the incidence of catastrophic western wildfires. Photograph courtesy NMSU.

These annual plants will reach their peak of nutritional quality and decline without being utilized for feed. I’m not saying that seed production is not important, but basically, if part of this landscape’s call is to support animals, then you are not optimizing what you have available.

My concept of virtual fencing was basically to have that perimeter fence around your property be conventional, whether it’s barbed wire, stone, wood, or whatever. But, internally, you don't have fences. You basically program “electronic” polygons, if you will, based upon the current year’s pattern of rainfall, pattern of poisonous weed growth, pattern of endangered species growth, and whatever other variables will affect your current year’s management decisions. Then you can use the virtual polygon to either include or exclude animals from areas on the landscape that you want to manage with scalpel-like precision.

To go back to my first example, you could be driving your property in your air-conditioned truck and you notice a spot that received rain in the recent past and that has a flush of highly nutritious plants that would otherwise be lost. Well, you can get on your laptop, right then and there, and program the polygon that contains your cows to move spatially and temporally over the landscape to this “better location.” Instead of having to build a fence or take the time and manpower to gather your cows, you would simply move the virtual fence.

This video clip shows two cows (the red and green dots) in a virtual paddock that was programmed to move across the landscape at 1.1 m/hr, using Dean Anderson's directional virtual fencing technology.

It’s like those join-the-dots coloring books—you end up with a bunch of coordinates that you connect to build a fence. And you can move the polygon that the animals are in over in that far corner of the pasture. You simply migrate it over, amoeba-like, to fit in this new area.

You basically have real-time management, which is something that is not currently possible in livestock grazing, even with all of the technologies that we have. If you take that concept of being able to manage in real time and you tie it with those sixty-eight other things that have been found useful, you can start to see the benefit that is potentially possible.

Twilley: The other thing that I thought was curious, which I picked up on from your publications, is this idea that perhaps you might not be out on the land in your air-conditioned pickup, and instead you might actually be doing this through remote sensing. Is that possible?

Anderson: Definitely. Currently we have a very active program here on the Jornada Experimental Range in landscape ecology using unmanned aerial vehicle reconnaissance. I see this research as fitting hand-in-glove with virtual fencing. However—and this is very important—all of these whiz-bang technologies are potentially great, but in the hands of somebody who is basically lazy, which is all human beings, or even in the hands of somebody who just does not understand the plant-animal interface, they could create huge problems.

If you don’t have people out on the landscape who know the difference between overstocking and under-stocking, then I will want to change my last name in the latter years of my life, because I don't want to be associated with the train wreck—I mean a major train wreck—that could happen through using this technology. If you can be sitting in your office in Washington D.C. and you program cows to move on your ranch in Montana, and you don't have anybody out on the ground in Montana monitoring what is taking place …. [shakes head] You could literally destroy rangeland.

We know that electronics are not infallible. We also know that satellite imagery needs to be backed up by somebody on the ground who can say, “Wow, we've got a problem here, because what the electronic data are saying does not match what I’m seeing.”

This is the thing that scares me the most about this methodology. If people decouple the best computer that we have at this point, which is our brain, with sufficient experience, from knowing how to optimize this wonderful tool, then we will have a potential for disaster that will be horrid.

Twilley: One of the things I was imagining as I looked at your work was that, as we become an increasingly urban society, maybe farmers could still manage rural land remotely, from their new homes in the city.

Anderson: They can, but only if they also have someone on the ground who has the knowledge and experience to ground-truth the data—to look at it and say, “The data saying that this number of cows should be in this polygon for this many days are accurate”—or not.

You need that flexibility, and you always need to ground-truth. The only way you can get optimum results, in my opinion, is to have someone who is trained in the basics of range science and animal science, to know when the numbers are good and when the numbers are lousy. Electronics simply provide numbers.

Now, you’re right, we are getting smarter at developing technology that can interpret those numbers. I work with colleagues in virtual fencing research who are basically trying to model what an animal does, so that they can actually predict where the animal is going to move before the animal actually moves. In my opinion if they ever figure that out, it’s going to be way past my lifetime.

Still, if you look at range science, it’s an art as well as science. I think it’s great that we have these technologies and I think we should use them. But we shouldn’t put our brain in a box on a table and say, “OK. We no longer need that.” Human judgment and expertise on the ground is still essential to making a methodology like this be a positive, rather than a negative, for landscape ecology.

Drawings from Anderson's patent #7753007 for an "Ear-a-round equipment platform for animals."

Manaugh: I'm curious about the bovine interface. How do you interface with the cow in order to stimulate the behavior that you want?

Anderson: I think that basically my whole career has been focused on trying to adopt innate animal behaviors to accomplish management goals in the most efficient and effective ways possible.

Here’s what I mean by that. I can guarantee that, if a sound that is unknown and unpleasant to the three of us happens over on that side of the room, we’re not going to go toward it. We’re going to get through that door on the other side as quickly as possible.

What I’m doing is taking something that’s innate across the animal world. If you stimulate an animal with something unknown, then, at least initially, it’s going to move away from it. If the event is also accompanied by an unpleasant ending experience and the sequence of events leading up to the unpleasant event are repeatable and predictable, after a few sequential experiences of these events, animals will try and avoid the ending event—if they’re given the opportunity. This is the principle that has allowed the USDA to receive a patent on this methodology.

The thing, first of all, about our technique is that it’s not a one size fits all. In other words, there are animals that you could basically look at cross-eyed and they’ll move, and then there are animals like me, where you’ve got to get a 2x6 and hit them up across the head to get their attention before anything happens.

When these kinds of systems have been built for dog training or dog containment in the past, they simply had a shock, or sometimes a sound first and then a shock. The stimulus wasn’t graded according to proximity or the animal’s personality.

Dean Anderson draws the route of a wandering cow approaching a virtual fence in order to show Venue how his DVF™ system works.

[stands up and draws on whiteboard] Let’s say that this is the polygon that we want the animal to stay in. If we are going to build a conventional fence, we would put a barbed wire fence or some enclosure around that polygon. In our system, we build a virtual belt, which in the diagrams is shaded from blue to red. The blue is a very innocuous sound, almost like a whisper. Moving closer to the edge of the polygon, into the red zone, I ramp that whisper up to the sound of a 747 at full throttle takeoff. I can have the sound all the way from very benign up to pretty irritating. At the top end, it’s as if a fire alarm went off in here—we’re going to get out, because it sounds terrible.

This video clip captures the first-time response of a cow instrumented with Dean Anderson's directional virtual fencing electronics when encountering a static virtual fence, established using GPS technology.

I’ve based the sounds and stimuli that I’ve used on what we know about cow hearing. Cows and humans are similar, but not identical. These cues were developed to fit the animal that we are trying to manage.

Now, if we go back to me as the example, I’m very stubborn. I need a little higher level of irritation to change my behavior. We chose to use electric stimulation.

I used myself as the test subject to develop the scale we’re using on this. My electronics guys were too smart. They wouldn't touch the electrodes. I’m just a dumb biologist, so…

Diagram showing how directional virtual fencing operates. The black-and-white dashed line (8) shows where a conventional fence would be placed. A magnetometer in the device worn on the cow’s head determines the animal’s angle of approach. A GPS system in the device detects when the animal wanders into the 200m-wide virtual boundary band. Algorithms then combine that data to determine which side of the animal's to cue, and at what intensity. From Dean M. Anderson's 2007 paper, "Virtual Fencing: Past, Present, and Future" (PDF).

If I’m the animal and I’m getting closer and closer to the edge of the polygon, then the electrodes that are in the device will send an electrical stimulation. In terms of what those stimulations felt like to me, the first level is about like hitting the crazy bone in your elbow. The next one is like scooting across this floor in your socks and touching a doorknob—that kind of static shock. The final one is like taking and stopping your gas-powered lawnmower by grabbing the spark plug barehanded.

What we did was cannibalize a Hot-Shot that some people buy and use to move animals down chutes. I touched the Hot-Shot output and I could still feel it in my fingertips the next morning, so we cut it right down for our version

As the cow moves toward the virtual fence perimeter, it goes from a very benign to a fairly irritating set of sensory cues, and if they’re all on at their highest intensity , it’s very irritating. It’s the 747s combined with the spark plug. Now, back from your eighth-grade geometry, you know that you have an acute angle and you have an obtuse angle. As the cow approaches a virtual fence boundary, we send the cues on the acute side, to direct her away from the boundary as quickly and with as little amount of irritation as possible. If we tried to move the cow by cuing the obtuse side, she would have had to move deeper into the irritation gradient before being able to exit it.

We don’t want to overstress the animal. So we end up, either in distance or time or both, having a point at which, if this animal decides it really wants what’s over here, it’s not going to be irritated to the point of going nuts. We have built-in, failsafe ways that, if the animal doesn’t respond appropriately, we are not going to do anything that would cause negative animal welfare issues.

Heart rate profile (beats per minute) of an 8-year-old free-ranging cross-bred beef cow before, during, and after an audio plus electric stimulation cue from a directional virtual fencing device. The cue was delivered at 0653 h. The second spike was not due to DVF cues; the cow was observed standing near drinking water during this time. From Dean M. Anderson's 2007 paper, "Virtual Fencing: Past, Present, and Future" (PDF).

The key is, if you can do the job with a tack hammer, don’t get a sledgehammer. This is part of animal welfare, which is absolutely the overarching umbrella under which directional virtual fencing was developed. There’s no need to stimulate an animal beyond what it needs. I can tell you that when I put heart rate monitors on cows wearing my DVF™ devices. I actually found more of a spike in their heart rates when a flock of birds flew over than when I applied the sound.

Now, there are going to be some animals that you either get your rifle and then put the product in your freezer, or you go put the animal back into a four-strand barbed wire fenced pasture. Not every animal on the face of the earth today would be controllable with virtual fencing. You could gradually increase the number of animals that do adapt well to being managed using virtual fencing in your herd through culling.

But the vast majority of animals will react to these irritations, at some level. They can choose at which point they react, all the way from the whisper to the lawnmower.

Here is the other thing: We all learn. Whatever we do to animals, we are teaching them something. It’s our choice as to what we want them to learn.

Of course, I don’t have data from a huge population that I can talk about. But, of the animals with whom I have worked—and the literature would support what I’m going to say—cows are, in fact smarter than human beings in a number of ways. If I give you the story of the first virtual fencing device that I built, I think you’ll see why I say that.

What our team did initially was cannibalize a kids’ remote control car to send a signal to the device worn by the animal. I had a Hereford/Angus cross cow, and she was a smart old girl. I started to cue her. I was close to her and she responded to the cues exactly the way I wanted her to. But she figured out, in less than five tries, that, if she kept twenty-five feet between me and her, I could press a button, and nothing would happen. I tried to follow her all over the field. She just kept that distance ahead of me for the rest of the trial—always more than twenty-five feet!

So that’s the reason why we are using GPS satellites to define the perimeter of the polygon. You can’t get away from that line.

What sets DVF™ apart from other virtual fencing approaches is that it’s not a one-size-fits-all. The cues are ramped, and the irritating cues are bilaterally applied, so we can make it directional, to steer the animals—no pun intended—over the landscape.

What’s interesting is that if you have the capacity to build a polygon, you can encompass a soil type, a vegetation situation, a poisonous plant, or whatever, much better than you can if you have to build a conventional fence. In building conventional fences, you have to have stretch posts every time you change the fence’s direction. That increases both materials and labor costs in construction, which is why you see many more rectangular paddocks than multi-sided polygons. Right now, you can assume that, on flat country, about fifty percent of the cost in a conventional fence is labor, and the other fifty percent is material. Stretching barbed wire around a corner, shown in this engraving from A Treatise Upon Wire: Its Manufacture and Uses, Embracing Comprehensive Descriptions of the Constructions and Applications of Wire Ropes, J. Bucknall Smith, 1891.

Twilley: Which raises another question: Is virtual fencing cost-effective?

Anderson: It depends. I’ll give you an example to show what I mean. The US Forest Service over in Globe, Arizona, is interested in possibly using virtual fencing. Some of the mining companies over there have leases that say that before they extract the ore, and even after, the surface may be leased to people with livestock.

That country over there is pretty much like a bunch of Ws put together. In March 2012, for two-and-a-half miles of four-strand barbed wire, using T posts, they were given a quote of $63,000.

That's why they called me. [laughs]

Now, if that was next to a road, even if it cost $163,000 for those two-and-a half miles of fence, it would be essential, in my opinion, that they not think about virtual fencing—not in this day and time.

In twenty years from now—somewhere in this century, at least—after the ethical and moral issues have been worked out, instead of stimulating animals with external audio sound or electrical stimulation, I think we will actually be stimulating internally at the neuronal level. At that point, virtual fencing may approach one hundred percent effective control.

The DARPA "Robo Rat," whose movements could be directly controlled by three electrodes inserted into its brain; photograph via.

It's been done with rodents. The idea was that these animals could be equipped with a camera or other sensors and sent into earthquake areas or fires or where there were environmental issues that humans really shouldn’t be exposed to. Of course, even if it can be done scientifically, there are still issues in terms of animal welfare. What if there is a radiation leak? Do you send rodents into it? You can see the moral and ethical issues that need to be worked out.

Twilley: If that ever becomes a real-world application, will you sell your shares in U.S. Steel?

Anderson: [laughs] I have a feeling that we never will have a landscape devoid of visible boundaries. If nothing else, I want a barbed wire fence between Ted Turner’s ranch and our experimental ranch up the road here. With a visible boundary, there’s no question—this side is mine and that side is yours.

Fencing photograph via InformedFarmers.com. Incidentally, Ted Turner's Vermejo ranch in New Mexico and southern Colorado is said to be the largest privately-owned, contiguous tract of land in the United States.

Twilley: Aha—so it’s the human animals that will still need a physical fence.

Anderson: I think so. Otherwise you’re looking at the landscape and there’s absolutely nothing out there—whether it be to define ownership or use or even health or safety hazards.

Manaugh: Do you think this kind of virtual fencing would have any impact on real estate practices? For example, I could imagine multiple ranchers marbling their usage of a larger, shared plot of land with this ability to track and contain their herds so precisely. Could virtual fencing thus change the way land is controlled, owned, or leased amongst different groups of people?

Anderson: If you were to go down here to the Boot Heel area of New Mexico you could find exactly that: individual ranchers are pooling areas to form a grass bank for their common use.

Anything that I can do in my profession to encourage flexibility, I figure I’m doing the correct thing. That’s where this all came from. It never made sense to me that we use static tools to manage dynamic resources. You learn from day one in all of your ecology classes and animal science classes that you are dealing with multiple dynamic systems that you are trying to optimize in relationship to each other. It was a mental disconnect for me, as an undergraduate as well as a graduate student, to understand how you could effectively manage dynamic resources with a static fence.

Now, there are some interesting additional things you learn with this system. For example, believe it or not, animals have laterality. You probably didn’t see the article that I published last year on sheep laterality. [laughter]

Anderson: Our white-faced sheep, which have Rambouillet and Polypay genetics, were basically right-handed. You’ll want to take a look at the data, of course, but, basically, animals are no different than you and I. There are animals that have a preference to turn right and others that have a preference to turn left.

Now, I didn’t do this study to waste government money. Think about it in terms of what I have told you about applying the cues bilaterally. If I know that my tendency is right-handed, then in order to get me to go left, I may need a higher level of stimulation on my right side than I would if you were trying to get me to go right by applying a stimulus on my left side, because it’s against my natural instincts.

With the computer technology we have today, everything we do can be stored in memory, so you can learn about each animal, and modify your stimulus accordingly. There is no reason at all that we cannot design the algorithms and gather data that, over time, will make the whole process optimized for each animal, as well as for the herd and the landscape.

Cow equipped with a collar-mounted GPS device; photography by Dave Ganskoop for the USDA ARS.

Twilley: Going back to something you said earlier about animal memory—and this may be too speculative a question to answer—I’m curious as to how dynamic virtual fencing affects how cows perceive the landscape.

Anderson: The question would be whether, if the virtual fence is on or near a particular rock, or a telephone pole, or a stream, and they have had electrical stimulation there before, do they associate that rock or whatever with a limit boundary? In other words, do they correlate visual landmarks with the virtual fence? Based on some non-published data I have collected, the answer is yes.

In fact, to give some context, there have been studies published showing that for a number of days following removal of an electric fence, cattle would still not cross the line where it had been located.

So this could indeed be an issue with virtual fencing, but—and my research on this topic is still very preliminary—I have not seen a problem yet, and I don’t think I will. Part of the reason is that cows want to eat, so if the polygon that contains the animals is programmed to move toward good forage, the cows will follow. It’s almost like a moving feed bunk, if you will. I'm sure that, in time—I would almost bet money on this—that if you were using the virtual fence to move animals toward better forage, you could almost eliminate the virtual fence line behind the animals, especially if the drinking water was kept near the “moving feed bunk.”

The other thing is that the consumer-level GPS receivers I have used in my DVF™ devices do not have the capability to have the fixes corrected using DGPS, which means that the fix may actually vary from the “true” boundary by as much as the length of a three-quarter ton pick-up. That’s to my benefit, because there is never an exact line where that animal is sure to be cued and hence the animal cannot match a particular stone or other environmental object with the stimulation event even if the virtual boundary is held static. It’s always going to be just in the general area.

Anderson: Yes, I believe so—although I don’t have enough data that I would want to stand on a podium and swear to that. But I think the variability in that GPS signal could be an advantage for virtual paddocks that spatially and temporally move over the landscape.

Twilley: We’ve talked about optimizing utilization and remote management, but are we missing some of the other ways that virtual fencing might transform the way we manage livestock or the land?

Anderson: Ideas that we know are good, but are simply too labor-intensive right now, will become reasonable. The big thing that has been in vogue for some time—and it still is, in certain places—is rotational stocking. The idea is that you take your land and divide it into many small paddocks and move animals through these paddocks, leaving the animals in any one paddock for only a few hours or days. It’s a great idea under certain situations, but think of the labor of building and maintaining all those fences, not to mention moving the animals in and out of different paddocks all the time.

With the virtual paddock you can just program the polygon to move spatially and temporally over the landscape. Even the shape of the virtual paddock can be dynamic in time and space as well. It can be slowed down where there’s abundant forage, and sped up where forage is limited so you have a completely dynamic, flexible system in which to manage free-ranging animals.

Here’s another thing. Like anybody who gathers free-ranging animals, I have a song I use. My song is pretty benign and can be sung among mixed audiences. [sings] “Come on sweetheart, let’s go. Come on. Come on. Come on, girls. Let’s go.”

In this video clip, a cow-calf pair are moved using only voice cues (Dean Anderson's gathering song) delivered from directional virtual fencing (DVF™) electronics carried by the cows on an ear-a-round (EAR™) system.

That’s the way I talk to them, if I want them to move. One day when I was out manually gathering my cows on an ATV I put a voice-activated recorder in my pocket and recorded my song. We later transferred the sounds of my manual gathering into the DVF™ device. Then when we wanted to gather the animals we wirelessly activated the DVF™ electronics and my “song”—“Come on, girls, let’s go”—began to play. Instead of a negative irritation, this was a positive cuing—and it worked.

The cows moved to the corral based on the cue, without me actually being present to manually gather them—it was an autonomous gather.

I think this type of thing also points to a paradigm shift in how we manage livestock. Sure, I can get my animals up in the middle of night to move them, but why do that? Why not try to manage on cow time, rather than our own egotistical needs—“At eight o’clock, I want these cows in so I can brand them,” or whatever. Why not mesh management routines with their innate behaviors instead? For example, my song could maybe be matched to correspond to a general time of day when the animals might start drifting in to drink water, anyway.

Twilley: I see—it’s a feedback loop where you’re cuing behavior with the GPS collars, but you’re also gathering data. You can see where they are already heading and change your management accordingly.

Anderson: Absolutely. You are matching needs and possibilities.

Manaugh: To make this work, does every animal have to be instrumented?

Anderson: This is a very valid question, but my answer varies. All the research needed to answer this question is not in, and the answers depend on the specific situation being addressed. I have a lot of people right now who are calling me and asking for a commercial device that they can put on their animals because they are losing them to theft. With the price of livestock where it is currently, cattle-rustling is not a thing of the nineteenth century. It is going on as we speak.

If that’s your challenge, then you’re going to need some kind of electronic gadgetry on every animal for absolute bookkeeping. For me, the challenge is how do you manage a large, extensive landscape in ways that we can’t do now, and I don’t think we necessarily need to instrument every animal for virtual fencing to be effective.

Instead, if you’ve got a hundred cows, you need to ask: which of those cows should you put instruments on? As a producer, you probably have a pretty good idea which animals should be instrumented and why: you would look for the leaders in the group.

Position of two cows grazing similar pastures in Montana, recorded every ten minutes over a two-week period. The difference in their grazing patterns reveal one cow to be a hill climber and one to be a bottom dweller. Image form a USDA Rangeland Management publication (PDF) co-authored by Derek Bailey, NMSU.

What’s interesting is that there are cows that prefer foraging up on top of hills. There are others that prefer being down in a riparian area. A colleague of mine at New Mexico State University, calls them bottom dwelling and hill climbing cows and this spatial foraging characteristic apparently has heritability. So it’s possible that you could select animals that fit your specific landscape. If, as I mentioned earlier, the ease with which an animal can be controlled by sensory cues also has heritability, it seems logical to assume that you could create hightech designer animals tailored to your piece of land.

Now, when you start adding all of these things together, using these electronic gadgetries and really leveraging innate behaviors, it points to a revolution in animal management—a revolution with really powerful potential to help us become much better stewards of the landscape.

This photograph shows a worm fence, an American invention. It was the most widely built fence type in the US through the 1870s, until Americans ran out of readily accessible forests, triggering a "fence crisis," in which the costs of fencing exceeded the value of the land it enclosed. The "crisis" was averted by the invention of mass-produced woven wire in the late 1800s. Photograph from the USDA History Collection, Special Collections, National Agricultural Library.

Twilley: None of this is commercially available yet, though, right?

Anderson: That’s true—you cannot go out today and buy a commercial DVF™ system, or for that matter any kind of virtual fence unit designed specifically for livestock, to the best of my knowledge. But there is a company that is interested in our patent and they are trying to get something off the ground. I’m trying to feed this company any information that I can, though I am not legally allowed to participate in the development of their product as a federal employee.

Manaugh: What are some of the obstacles to commercial availability?

Anderson: The largest immediate challenge I see is answering the question of how you power electronics on free-ranging animals for extended periods of time. We have tried solar and it has potential. I think one of the most exciting things, though, is kinetic energy. I understand that there are companies working on a technology to be used in cellphones that will charge the cell phone simply by the action of lifting it out of your purse or pocket, and the Army has got several things going on now with backpacks for soldiers that recharge electronic communication equipment as a result of a soldier’s walking movement.

I don’t think the economics warrant animal agriculture developing any of these power technologies independently, but I think we can capitalize on that being developed in other, more lucrative industries and then simply adapt it for our needs. When I developed the concept of DVF™ I designed it to be a plug-and-pray device. As soon as somebody developed a better component, I would throw my thing out and plug theirs in—and pray that it would improve performance. Sometimes it did and sometimes it didn’t!

Anderson: That’s an interesting suggestion that I have not looked into. However, I have though a lot about capturing kinetic energy. If you watch a cow, their ears are always moving, and so are their tails. If we can capture any of that movement….

The other thing we need is demand from the market. In 2007, I was invited to the UK to discuss virtual fencing —the folks in London were more interested in virtual fencing than anybody else I have ever talked to in the world.

The reason was really interesting. England has a historic tradition of common land, which is basically open “green space” that surrounds the city and was originally used for grazing by people who had one or two sheep or cows. Nowadays, it’s mostly used by dog walkers, pony riders—for recreation, basically. The problem is that they need livestock back on these landscapes to actually utilize vegetation properly so certain herbaceous vegetation does not threaten some of the woody species. However, none of the present-day users want conventional fencing because of the gates that would have to be opened and shut to contain the animals. So they were interested in virtual fencing as a way to get the ecology back into line using domestic herbivores, in a landscape that needs to be shared with pony riders and dog walkers who don’t want to shut gates and might not do it reliably, anyway.

But it’s an interesting question. I’ve had some sleepless nights, up at two in the morning wondering, “Why is it not being embraced?” I think that a lot of it comes strictly down to economics.

I don’t know, at this point, what a setup would cost. But, in my opinion, there are ways we could implement this immediately and have it be very viable. You wouldn’t have every animal instrumented. You can have single-hop technology, so information uploads and downloads at certain points the animals come to with reliable periodicity—the drinking water or the mineral supplement, say. That’s not real-time, of course—but it’s near real-time. And it would be a quantum leap compared to how we currently manage livestock.

Barbed wire, patented by Illinois farmer Joseph Glidden in 1874, opened up the American prairie for large-scale farming. Photograph by Tiago Fioreze, Wikipedia.

Twilley: What do the farmers themselves think of this system?

Anderson: What I’ve heard from some ranchers is something along the lines of: “I've already got fences and they work fine. Why do I need this unproven new technology?”

On the other hand, dairy farmers who have automatic milking parlors, which allow animals to come in on their own volition to get milked, think virtual fencing would be very appropriate for their type of operation, for reasons of convenience rather than economics.

Now, let me tell you what I think might actually work. I think that environmentalists could actually be very beneficial in pushing this forward. Take a situation where you have an endangered bird species that uses the bank of a stream for nesting or reproduction. Under current conditions, the rancher can’t realistically afford to fence out a long corridor along a stream just for that two-week period. That’s a place where virtual fencing is a tool that would allow us to do the best ecological management in the most cost-effective way.

But the larger point is that we cannot afford to manage twenty-first century agriculture using grandpa’s tools, economically, sociologically, and biologically.

Some people have said, “Well, I think you are just ahead of your time with this stuff.” I’m not sure that’s true. In any case, in my personal opinion, if I’m not doing the research that looks twenty years out into future before it’s adopted, then I’m doing the wrong kind of research. In 2005, Gallagher, one of the world’s leading builders of electric fences, invited me to talk about virtual fencing. During that conversation, they told me that they believe that, by the middle of this century, virtual fencing will be the fencing of choice.

But here’s the thing: none of us have gone to the food counter and found it empty. When you have got a full stomach, the things that maybe should be looked at for that twenty-year gap are often not on the radar screen. As long as the barbed wire fences haven’t rusted out completely, the labor costs can be tolerated, and the environmental legislation hasn’t become mandatory, then why spend money? That’s human nature. You only do what you have to do and not much more.

The point is that it’s going to take a number of sociological and economic factors, in my opinion, for this methodology of animal control to be implemented by the market. But speaking technologically, we could go out with an acceptable product in eighteen months, I believe. It wouldn’t have multi-hop technology. It would equal the quality of the first automobile rather than being comparable to a Rolls Royce in terms of “extras”—that would have to await a later date in this century.

And here’s another idea: I think that there ought to be a tax on every virtual fencing device that is sold or every lease agreement that’s signed in the developed world. That tax would go to help developing countries manage their free-ranging livestock using this methodology because that’s where we need to be better stewards of the landscape and where we as a world would all benefit from transforming some of today’s manual labor into cognitive labor.

Herding cattle the old-fashioned way on the Jornada Experimental Range; photograph by Peggy Greb for USDA ARS.

Maybe with this technology, a third-world farmer could put a better thatched roof on his house or send his kids to school, because he doesn’t need their manual labor down on the farm. It’s fun for a while to be out on a horse watching the cows; what made the West and Hollywood famous were the cowboys singing to their cows. I love that; that’s why I’m in this profession. Still, I’m not a sociologist, but it seems as though you could take some of that labor that is currently used managing livestock in developing countries and all of the time it requires and you could transfer it into things that would enhance human well-being and education.

It’s in our own interest, too. If non-optimal livestock management is creating ecological sacrifice areas, where soil is lost when the rains come or the wind blows, that particulate matter doesn’t stop at national boundaries.

I always say that virtual fencing is going to be something that causes a paradigm shift in the way we think, rather than just being a new tool to keep doing things in the same old way. That’s the real opportunity.

Perky's Bat Tower stands at the end of an unmarked dirt road on Sugarloaf Key as a striking, albeit unsuccessful, monument to both biological pest control and cross-species design.

Before the Florida Keys meant sun, sea, and Jimmy Buffet, they were famous for mosquitoes—dense, black clouds of them that hummed and bit without pause, spread malaria, dengue, and yellow fever, and drove visitors temporarily insane with irritation.

In the late nineteenth century, the Broward Palm Beach New Times reported swarms "so dense in some areas that it was impossible to breathe without inhaling mouthfuls of mosquitoes." A twentieth-century entomologist caught a terrifying—and record-breaking —"365,696 mosquitoes in one trap in one night" on an island just off the tip of the Florida peninsula, according to Michael Grunwald's book, The Swamp.

And, in the 1920s, hordes of mosquitoes were the major obstacle standing between Richter Clyde Perky, a real estate developer from Denver, and the success of his fishing resort on Lower Sugarloaf Key. The construction manager Perky had hired to oversee the project complained that "in the late afternoon, you would just have to rake the bugs off your arm" and that "they'd form a black print on your hand if you put it against a screen and suck all the blood right out of it."

In his search for a solution, Perky came across a book called Bats, Mosquitoes, and Dollars by Dr. Charles Campbell. A doctor and "city bacteriologist" based in San Antonio, Texas, Campbell had been experimenting with attracting bats to artificial roosts since the turn of the century, in the belief that they were the natural predators of mosquitoes. As an article in BATS magazine explains, Campbell initially thought that the design of bat architecture would be a simple matter:

"Can bats like bees be colonized and made to multiply where we want them?" he wondered. "This would be no feat at all!...Don't they just live in any old ramshackle building? They would be only too glad to have a little home such as we provide for our song birds..."

After a handful of expensive failures, followed by several months spent in the caves of West Texas, observing bats in their natural environment, Campbell came up with his pioneering design for a Malaria-Eradicating Guano Producing Bat Roost, "built according to plans furnished by the greatest and only infallible of all architects, Nature," and equipped with "all the conveniences any little bat heart could possibly desire."
His new tower, claimed as the world's first successful intentional artificial bat roost, was built next to Mitchell's Lake, ten miles south of San Antonio, in spring 1911. Malaria cases in the neighborhood decreased, Campbell cleared hundreds of dollars in guano sales, and the Mitchell's Lake tower was soon followed by more than a dozen more built to the same design, one as far afield as Italy.

Perky obtained the roost plans from Campbell in 1929, and constructed his own tower at a cost of $10,000. More than thirty feet tall, and sturdy enough to have weathered dozens of hurricanes over the past eighty years, the tower still features a louvered bat entrance facing the prevailing wind, a central guano removal chute, and a dense, honeycombed walls of cypress wood bat corrugation that function as roosting shelves.

Sadly, despite a lavish application of pheromone-doused guano as bait, not a single bat ever moved into in the palatial accommodations Perky had provided. (In fact, the first scientifically confirmed colony of bats in the Keys was only found in 1996.)

Today, the Florida Keys Mosquito Control District regards Perky's Bat Tower as their founding monument, but relies instead on a full-time team of seventy-one employees armed with handheld foggers, spray trucks, four helicopters, and two fixed-wing aircraft from which to dispense regular doses of larvicide granules and pesticide sprays onto the landscape. They are currently contemplating a not uncontroversial return to biological control with the purchase and release of genetically-modified mosquitoes, whose offspring die upon hatching.

Meanwhile, Perky's tower is finally home to a winged animal. Standing in a pool of stagnant, mosquito-friendly water, the weathered pine pyramid is currently topped with an active osprey nest—architecture by animals atop architecture for animals.